
Class. 
Book 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



LECTURES ON LATIN POETRY 



LATIN POETRY 



LECTURES DELIVERED IN 1893 ON THE PERCY 

TURNBULL MEMORIAL FOUNDATION IN 

THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY 




R. Y. TYRRELL 

REGIUS PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF DUBLIN 









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BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

(Cbe ifiitaersi&e Stress, CambnDge 






Coypyright, 1895, 
By R. Y. TYRRELL. 

All rights reserved. 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. 0. Houghton & Co. 



TO THE PARENTS OF 

PERCY GRAEME TURNBULL 
@.W Volume 

IS DEDICATED WITH SENTIMENTS OF THE SINCEREST 
RESPECT, ADMIRATION, AND ESTEEM 



BALTIMORE, MARYLAND. 

fit/ca gevapKei koivov (f>e'yyos. 

Pindar, Nem. iv. 12. 

Oh for red flowers of fire from Pindar's hand, 
To weave with warp of legendary lore 
That pictured woof the tale of Baltimore / 

O fairest daughter of old Maryland, 

O lordly town on whose inviolate strand 
Burst the loud shock of war that overbore 
The tyrannous Atlantic's imminent roar ! 

Long to its scabbard her reluctant brand 

Clave : and when, weeping — those were gracious tears • 

At last she drew it, then with force tenfold 

The huge third wave of battle ruining roWd 
And thunder } d on, till from the frozen meres 

To sun-bathed Florida, from main to main, 

Man cast from off him Race's galling chain. 

R. Y. Tyrrell. 



PREFACE. 



These lectures form the third course delivered 
on the Percy Turnbull Memorial foundation in the 
Johns Hopkins University of Baltimore in the spring 
of 1893. The first course was given by Mr. Ed- 
mund Clarence Stedman in 1891, on "The Nature 
and Elements of Poetry," and was followed in 1892 
by " The Growth and Influence of Classical Greek 
Poetry," by Professor Jebb. I will not deprecate 
in vain the (alas ! ) inevitable comparison with these 
two masterly volumes, but will hasten to put be- 
fore my readers the general scope and aim which I 
proposed to myself, and in doing so I will use the 
words which formed the opening paragraphs of the 
introductory lecture as delivered in Baltimore : — 

" In the first of the lectures I take a very rapid 
survey of Latin poetry as a whole, never pausing to 
consider at all closely any particular poet, except 
in the case of one or two literary personages whose 
influence on the course of Latin poetry seems to 
have been generally underrated, and to whom I 
shall not have an opportunity to recur in subse- 
quent lectures. I fear the imperative necessity 
to generalize on this first — to me most welcome 
— occasion of making your acquaintance will ren- 
der it hard for me to avoid trying your patience. 



PREFACE 



The next lecture, too, dealing with the early 
Latin poetry, must still be of a somewhat general 
cast. After that we shall be able to confine our 
attention mainly to individual poets, or to compared 
or contrasted pairs of poets, until the consideration 
of the Poetry of the Decline again makes it neces- 
sary to abandon the microscope for the field-glass, 
and to accommodate our vision to a wider prospect. 
I will endeavor here briefly to describe what will 
be my scope and aim. 

" It is plain that I should not have sufficient time, 
even supposing I had sufficient audacity, to con- 
struct a kind of catechism of what we should believe 
about Latin poetry, or even to attempt to give 
an exhaustive summary of its contents. Still less 
would it be possible or profitable to try to set forth 
a conspectus of what other people have thought on 
this subject. It comes, then, to this : I must aim 
at putting before you what I think most interesting 
in connection with Latin poetry, sometimes describ- 
ing how certain masterpieces (for, of course, we 
shall be brought to consider some masterpieces) 
have affected myself. I hope, therefore, that if I 
do not constantly pause to explain that I am only 
giving what is in my own mind, and not at all 
claiming any right to speak ex cathedra, you will 
not for that reason suppose that I am putting for- 
ward for your acceptance views which I am really 
submitting to your judgment. This University has 
invited an expression of my opinions on a subject 
which has been for many years most attractive to 



PRE FA CE XI 



me, and I regard such an invitation on your part 
as a very distinguished honor done to me and to my 
University. I hope to gain your assent to most of 
my views, and, even when I do not gain assent, I 
shall be glad if I succeed in stimulating the play of 
consciousness on important and fascinating topics, 
even though it should take the form of a criticism 
which even if dissentient will, I am sure, be kind. 
I shall not attempt to give a life of each poet who 
may be under consideration, except in so far as the 
incidents of his career have left a distinct impress 
on his work. It will be more in accordance with 
my own tastes, and (as I believe) with the scope 
of the Percy Turnbull Lectures, to devote the hours 
during which it will be my pleasant task to address 
you, not to biography or literary history, but rather 
to analysis and literary criticism ; and to endeavor 
to set before you rather studies in the different 
poets and periods than chapters in a history of lit- 
erature. I shall have to ask, not what were the 
works of each poet, but what was his work ; how he 
looked out on the world, and what was the world 
on which he looked ; whether he had a message to 
society, and how far he succeeded in delivering it. 
" I shall be by no means an unvarying eulogist 
of Latin poetry. Indeed, in the case of some of 
the poets I fear I shall run the risk of being called 
a harsh and unsympathetic critic. I shall have to 
put before you many things which have often been 
said before. I have, however, endeavored as much 
as possible to avoid tracks that are too well beaten, 



Xll PRE FA CE 



and to dwell in preference on points of view which 
may seem to have been comparatively neglected. 

" To attempt, it may be said, to say anything at 
the same time true and new on such a theme as 
Virgil or Horace, really seems out of the question. 
But it is a characteristic of philological and histor- 
ical inquiry that the same subject admits of being 
viewed from very diverse points, and this is pe- 
culiarly true in dealing with poetry. Each actor, 
each musician, has a different way of rendering 
Shakespeare or Beethoven, and there is no final 
interpretation of the work of a great artist. Lit- 
erature can do no more than give us the opinions 
and sentiments of particular persons at particular 
times. To estimate — even to understand — these 
opinions and sentiments, we must know something 
of the times and circumstances in which they were 
expressed. It will be requisite, therefore, now and 
then, to invade the domain of history and biogra- 
phy, and thus diversify our more purely literary 
studies." 

Such, then, broadly, was my aim. But here I 
must make my acknowledgments to the writers 
who have throughout been my guides and inspir- 
ers. Many of them will be at once recognized as 
indispensable : for instance, every writer or lec- 
turer on Lucretius must owe infinite obligations 
to the great work of Munro ; and the same remark 
applies to the best editors of the other great poets 
of Rome : I mean to that editor who (like Coning- 
ton and Mayor and Ellis) has in each case been 



PRE FA CE xm 



acknowledged to have made a particular poet his 
own peculiar province. Then the historians of 
Rome — Mommsen, Merivale, Gibbon — often help 
the lecturer, as well as histories of literature, like 
the excellent work of Mr. Crutwell, and the late 
Professor Sellar's acute and eloquent studies in 
Roman poetry. The German writers, especially 
Bernhardy and Teuffel revised by Schwabe, are, 
of course, very valuable. But I have found the 
French school most helpful and stimulating. 
M. Patin's volumes entitled " Etudes sur la Poesie 
Latine " have been invaluable to me, especially in 
the earlier lectures, and, though I have often ex- 
pressed my obligations to him, I owe to him many 
debts not specifically acknowledged, in the way of 
suggestion and point of view. An equal or greater 
debt I would own to another charming French 
critic, M. Constant Martha, whose eloquent study, 
" Le Poeme de Lucrece," is as fascinating in style 
and as profound in insight as his " Moralistes sous 
l'Empire Romain," which works have both been 
largely used by me in the third and seventh lec- 
tures. Nisarcl's " Les Poetes Latins de la Deca- 
dence " was the basis of the last lecture. Often, 
too, the masterly essays of M. Gaston Boissier have 
been helpful and inspiring. Indeed, for breadth of 
view as well as charm of style, the French writers 
on Latin literature seem to me quite unrivaled. 

In the case of other writers who have not been 
so largely used, acknowledgment is made to each 
in his own place. Among them I would mention 



xiv PRE FA CE 



especially the late Professor Nettleship's essays, 
and the tract of Hartman, "/De Horatio Poeta." 

Though my obligations to previous writers are 
so large, my own opinions will be found to be a 
very pronounced ingredient in the book : I fear 
they will seem too pronounced to some, especially 
to the uncompromising and indiscriminate fautores 
veterum. 

Many of the lectures appeared in English and 
American magazines either before or after they 
were delivered as lectures ; and I have to thank 
the proprietors and editors of the several maga- 
zines, especially those of the " Quarterly Review " 
(London), and the "Atlantic Monthly" (Boston), 
for permission to use them in this volume. In 
hardly any case, however, does the lecture appear 
in exactly the same form which it had as an article. 
Nor are the lectures printed precisely as they were 
delivered. To some (especially V., VI., VIII.), 
considerable additions have been made. The Ap- 
pendix on Recent Translators of Virgil formed no 
part of the lecture as delivered in Baltimore and 
Chicago ; neither did the remarks on Petronius in 
the eighth lecture. I have not printed in the lec- 
tures certain expressions called forth from me from 
time to time at their delivery by the uniform cour- 
tesy and friendliness of my hearers in America, at 
Baltimore, Richmond, Chicago, and New York, — 
a courtesy and friendliness which upheld me at a 
time when my state of health made me apprehen- 
sive lest I should be quite unfit to show myself at 



PREFACE xv 



all worthy of the high distinction which the invita- 
tion of the several learned bodies conferred on me. 
I therefore ask leave to express here my deep and 
abiding sense of the true kindness and generosity 
of which I was the object in America. Dull in- 
deed would be the lecturer who should not feel, in 
such audiences as I had the good fortune to meet, 
a source of sustaining inspiration and of a comfort- 
ing conviction that, whatever failings there might 
be on his part, one thing at all events would not 
fail, — the encouraging kindliness and genuine 
sympathy of hearers as sincerely warm-hearted as 
keenly intelligent. 



CONTENTS. 



INTRODUCTORY. 

PAGE 

Different points of view from which Poetry may be regarded . i 

Chief bequest of Rome to the civilized world ...... 2 

Rise of Latin, as distinguished from Greek, poetry .... 2 

Testimonies to its foreign origin 2 

Pre-Hellenic Latin poetry 4 

Effect of Greek literature 5 

Difficulties which beset the rise of the Drama 5 

Early success of Tragedy 7 

Difficulty in the history of Latin Tragedy 7 

Plautus and Terence 8 

Their successors 8 

Verses ascribed to Trabea 8 

Atellane plays 9 

The mimes 11 

Anecdote about Caesar and Laberius 11 

Anecdote about Cicero and Laberius 12 

Publilius Syrus 13 

Poetry of the Caesarian epoch 13 

Cicero's poetry 14 

Cicero's translations from the Greek 18 

Lucretius and Catullus 19 

The Augustan College of Poets 20 

Lost Augustan poets 21 

M. Patin's view of the extant Augustan poetry 23 

Virgil and Ovid 26 

Post-Augustan poetry 27 



xviii CONTENTS 



II. 

EARLY LATIN POETRY. 

Characteristics of very early Roman poetry 28 

Anecdote illustrating the popularity of the Ennian epic ... 31 

Roman tragedy 32 

Passages in Ennius anticipating sentiments in modern literature 34 

Pacuvius 35 

His defects 36 

His popularity 36 

Attius 37 

Latin tragic poets compared 39 

Elevation of Attius 39 

Common sense of Attius 41 

Defects in Latin tragedy 41 

Latin comedy 43 

Characteristic features of Latin comedy 44 

Consequent confusions 45 

Horace's criticism on Plautus 46 

Motifs of his plays 47 

Defects in construction 48 

Amphitruo 48 

Political life in Latin comedy 49 

Prologues of Plautus and Terence 50 

Civil and domestic life 50 

Plautine drama not adverse to morality 52 

Plautus essentially urban 52 

Compared with Dickens 53 

Compared with Terence 53 

Terence 54 

His refinement 54 

Meyer's view of Terence 55 

Literary referees under the Republic 56 

Caecilius 56 

Afranius 57 

III. 

LUCRETIUS AND EPICUREANISM. 

Epicureanism as a doctrine dead 59 

Sources of vitality in the poem of Lucretius 59 

Varied attractions of the poem 60 



CONTENTS 



XIX 



Relation of Lucretius towards God and Religion 61 

Roman religion 62 

Attitude of Lucretius towards it 64 

Enthusiasm of Lucretius 67 

Illustrated by his attitude towards the passions 68 

His worship of Epicurus 68 

His delight and belief in his work 69 

His " towering passion " 69 

The valley of the shadow of death 70 

The gospel according to Lucretius 71 

Lucretius on death 72 

Allusions to Lucretius by ancient writers 74 

Criticism of Cicero on Lucretius 74 

Tales about his life 75 

Doctrine of a future life in the ancient world 75 

The " anti-Lucretius " in Lucretius 77 

Language of Lucretius religious 79 

Lucretius compared with Swift 80 

Originality of Lucretius 81 

Vehicle of his teaching 81 

Childish speculations in the poem 82 

Epicureanism a thorough-going belief 83 

Relation of scientific theories to religion 84 

Anticipations of modern science in Lucretius 85 

Intense interest of Lucretius in his work 86 

Beauty of imagery and diction 86 

Place of Lucretius among the poets of the world 89 

IV. 

CATULLUS AND THE TRANSITION TO THE AUGUSTAN AGE. 

Lucretius and Catullus contrasted 90 

The poems of Catullus the history of his heart 91 

Position and circumstances of Catullus 92 

Clodia, the Lesbia of Catullus 94 

M. Caelius Rufus 98 

Poems illustrating the growth of the passion of Catullus . .100 

Other poems of Catullus 106 

Mistaken comparison of Catullus with Moore 108 

Ode to his villa at Sirmio no 



xx CONTENTS 



The shorter poems 1 1 1 

The "Attis" n 2 

Figure borrowed by Tennyson from the " Attis " . . . .115 

Sadness of Catullus 116 

Catullus the connecting link with Augustan poetry . . . .117 

Elegiac poetry of the Augustan age 118 

Propertius 119 

Tibullus 120 

Propertius and Ovid compared 121 

Ovid 123 

V. 

VIRGIL. 

Influence of Virgil on subsequent thought and letters . . .126 

His success immediate and enduring 127 

Reaction against Virgil in the present century 128 

Comparison with Homer 129 

The Aeneid as an epic poem 130 

Contrast with the Greek 130 

Gentleness of mood 131 

Contrast with Homer's enjoyment of battle 132 

Virgilian catalogues compared with Homeric 133 

Conscious art of Virgil 134 

Aeneid not to be treated as a romance 136 

Fine manners of Aeneas 138 

Choice of Aeneas as a hero 139 

Distinction of tone in the Aeneid 140 

Virgil's similes compared with the Greek 141 

First six books of the Aeneid compared with last six ... 143 

Famous passages in Virgil 145 

Virgil a religious poet 154 

Virgil as a saint, and as a magician 156 

Sadness of Latin poetry 160 

VI. 

HORACE. 

Comparative neglect of Horace in his own time 162 

His great popularity in modern times 164 

The sources of his attractiveness 165 



CONTENTS xxi 



Professor Sellar on Horace 166 

Relation of Horace towards his predecessors 167 

Horace compared with Pope 168 

Merits and defects of Lucilius 169 

How used by Horace 169 

Source of Lucilian fragments 172 

Probable Lucilian origin of Sat. I. 9 172 

The journey to Brundisium 173 

The dinner of Nasidienus 176 

Horace's moral essays 177 

Example of a figure borrowed from Lucilius 18 r 

The Epistles 182 

The Epodes and Odes 184 

Divergent views about the Odes 185 

Imaginary incidents 186 

Horace's Sabine farm a welcome present 187 

But Horace was not a lover of the country 189 

Insincerity of his love poems 192 

Views of Peerlkamp, Goethe, and Hartman 193 

Horace's attitude towards poetry 195 

Incorrect expressions in the Odes . 197 

Examples of uncertain touch 198 

Type-hunting expounders of Horace 199 

Further examples of insincerity in the love poems 204 

Horace as a literary critic 206 

Chief source of his popularity with the modern world . . . 208 

His relations towards Maecenas . . .211 

Eccentricity of Maecenas 213 

Horace and Maecenas both rare types . . .214 

VII. 

LATIN SATIRE. 

Rise and source of Satire 216 

Relation to Atellane plays and mimes 218 

Originality of Latin Satire 219 

The Roman satirists enjoyed their work 221 

Discrepant estimates of Persius 221 

His style and diction 224 

Horatian passages how modified by Persius 226 



XX11 



CONTENTS 



Home life of Persius . . 227 

Its effect on his writings 231 

His Philistines 232 

Subjects of his Satires 233 

His Christian tone 235 

His ethics 236 

Juvenal and Persius contrasted 237 

In what sense was Juvenal a satirist ? 238 

His life 240 

His attitude toward vice 240 

Juvenal a preacher 243 

But not a martyr 244 

His picturesqueness 245 

Defects arising from it 248 

Roman traits in Juvenal 250 

His blindness to social tendencies 252 

His contempt for the Greeks 254 

For the Jews 255 

His attitude toward religion 255 

Toward slaves 256 

Toward the poor and Christianity 257 

The spirit of his age 258 



VIII. 

LATIN POETRY OF THE DECLINE. 

Phaedrus 260 

Compared with Aesop 261 

Lucan's precocity 262 

His early training 263 

The emperor's jealousy and its result 264 

Lucan's death 265 

Quintilian's criticism on the " Pharsalia " 267 

Lucan's religious feelings, and his rhetoric 267 

His exaggeration 268 

Lucan a perfect type of Silver Poetry 268 

Seneca 269 

Effect of Stoicism on his plays 270 

Compared with Euripides 271 



CONTENTS 



xxin 



Petronius Arbiter 272 

His work an excellent picture of social life 274 

Specimen of the " Satyricon " from this point of view . . -275 

General estimate of the " Satyricon " 279 

Recitation, its rise and fall 281 

Statius 283 

Poet to the aristocracy 284 

Martial 285 

Often misrepresented 286 

Poorly rewarded for his flatteries 286 

Meagre details of his life 287 

Estimate of his poetry 288 

Statius and Martial compared 289 

The worst line in Latin poetry 291 

Merivale on the Flavian epoch 291 

Latin verse-writers 292 

APPENDIX. 

Some recent translations of Virgil 295 

Index 321 



LECTURES ON LATIN POETRY. 



INTRODUCTORY. 



Poetry may be regarded and estimated from 
two points of view, — the a priori and Different 
the a posteriori. The former rests on IK from 
principles which are very likely to be poetry may 
arbitrary and incomplete. It will always be re g ard e& 
be found to be more satisfactory to ask ourselves 
what a thing is or has been — provided, of course, 
an answer is possible — than to decide what it 
ought to be according to certain principles laid 
down by ourselves. The a priori method has 
manifest disadvantages in a review which extends 
over many centuries. For, as regards poetry at 
least, abstract principles must of necessity be vague 
and shifting. Just as a great traveler makes our 
old maps worse than useless when a lake takes the 
place of a Sahara, and a mountain ridge that of 
a prairie, so too in literature, sometimes a new 
planet swims into our ken, and the main principles 
of artistic construction are revolutionized. What 
would Pope have made of Browning, or of Walt 
Whitman ? Would Edgar Allan Poe have thought 



INTRODUCTORY 



of describing as a novel that delicate study in 
psychological analysis, " The Lady of the Aroos- 
took"? 

It is in her Prose rather than in her Poetry that 
Chief Rome has really expressed herself. For 

bequest of a long time the Roman people were ex- 
Rome to the . & . , 
civilized clusively devoted to agriculture and war. 

Their sole care was to defend themselves 
and preserve their existence, to devise for them- 
selves some kind of constitution in the constant 
struggle of patrician and plebeian, of rich and poor, 
and to discover a modus vivendi with their exter- 
nal and intestine foes. To these problems they 
devoted all their energies, and their efforts in these 
directions were crowned with conspicuous suc- 
cess. Their laws have survived the Roman Re- 
public to this day, have afforded a model to the 
civilized world, and bid fair to last as long as 
Western civilization endures. 

Poetry came to the Roman nation late, after the 

conquest of Italy, Carthage, and Greece, 
Latin, as dis- and formed part of the plunder of the 
from Greek, world which began to pour into the Im- 
poetry ' perial treasuries. Hence the first and 

broadest distinction between Greek poetry, which 
developed naturally, and Latin, which was trans- 
planted ; and this is the reason why Rome suc- 
ceeded best in didactic poetry, because that 

product of art best bears removal to 

Testimonies * 

to its foreign another soil. When the Greek nation 
origin. ^ became a province of Rome, the Latin 



FOREIGN ORIGIN 



literature became a province of the Greek. This 
fact is oftenest expressed in the terse but trite 
Horatian verse which tells how — 

" Captive Greece captured her conqueror rude ; " 

but not less apt, and certainly less hackneyed, are 
the words which Livy puts into the mouth of 
Cato in the Senate, — " Therefore the more I fear 
that these things may prove our conquerors, not 
we theirs." a The same rather obvious truth is 
expressed with characteristic rudeness by Porcius 
Licinius, a poet contemporary with Cicero : — 

" During the second Punic War, to Italy's rude land 
The Muse repair'd with winged foot, and there she took 
her stand." a 

Equally characteristic of its author is the ele- 
gance with which Ovid describes the early struggles 
of Rome, which left her no time for the cultivation 
of literature. 

" Not yet had Greece, the home of words not deeds, 
On her rude conquerors imposed her creeds ; 
Who best could fight, his was the highest art, 
And he most learn'd who best could launch the dart." 8 

1 "Eo plus horreo ne illae magis res nos capiant quam 
nos illas. " — XXX. 4. 

2 " Poenico bello secundo Musa pinnato gradu 

Intulit se bellicosam in Romuli gentem feram." 
8 " Nondum tradiderat victas victoribus artes 
Graecia, f acundum sed male forte genus ; 
Qui bene pugnabat Romanam noverat artem, 
Mittere qui potuit tela disertus erat." 

Fast. III. 101. 



INTRODUCTORY 



When we refer to Latin poetry before the Greek 
„ TT , influence, we are either talking; of an 

Pre-Hel- ° 

lemc Latin assumed and hypothetical literature like 

P06try. 

that of which Macaulay has given us 
such ingenious and eloquent specimens in his 
"Lays of Ancient Rome," or else of writings and 
documents which have nothing but the name in 
common with poetry as we now understand the 
word. Cicero, indeed, tells us that Appius Clau- 
dius Caecus wrote a poem of a gnomic character 
which he calls Pythagorean. If he did, it is in- 
teresting to find that didactic poetry was not only 
Rome's greatest success, but her earliest attempt. 
But for the rest, early Roman poetry, which was 
then called scriptura, was used only for state docu- 
ments, lists and records, and the poets were called 
scribae. The poems, carmina, were laws such as 
those of the Twelve Tables, treaties of the kings 
with Gabii and the Sabines, pontifical books, and 
such like, and were written in Saturnian verse. 
Beside these there were rustic litanies, and those 
chants at festivals and funerals in praise of ances- 
tors and founders of families, of which Cicero 
speaks, and on which Macaulay based his theory 
of a lost Latin ballad poetry. To these must be 
added the Fescennine strains in which peasants 
bantered each other at rustic merry-makings, and 
from which more or less directly rose three kinds 
of composition in which Roman writers achieved 
high success, — comedy, satire, and amoebean pas- 
toral poetry. 



EFFECT OF GREEK LITERATURE 5 

But all these pale dawnings of art faded into 
mist before the sunburst of Greek lit- ^„ 

Effect of 

erature. To apply to it the eulogy of Greek 
Lucretius on Epicurus, Greek literature 
extinguished everything on which its radiance 
burst, — 

" E'en as the Sun uprisen quenches the fires of Night." 1 

The first and greatest debt to Greece was the 
Drama, the popularity of which at Rome Difficulties 
has been greatly underrated. It is true ^ h e 1C H S e e s f et 
that it had to struggle with certain diffi- the Drama - 
culties which it did not meet in Greece, and to 
which in modern times it is not exposed. The 
Romans unquestionably looked on the expression 
of grief as unmanly. Cicero condemns Sopho- 
cles for allowing Philoctetes to utter cries of pain, 
and for suffering Heracles to give voice to his 
agony in the death scene in the "Trachiniae ; " 
and commends Pacuvius for putting no lamenta- 
tions into the mouth of Ulysses when dying of the 
wound inflicted by his son Telegonus. Pacuvius 
expresses the Roman feeling when he says that 

" A man may rail against the strokes of Fortune, 
But not bewail them : that were woman's part." 2 

Attius tells us that the best comfort in affliction 
is the hope that we have concealed our wound. In 
the " Telamon " of Ennius, the father, hearing of 

1 " Restinxit Stellas exortus ut aetherius Sol." 

2 " Conqueri fortunam adversam non lamentari decet ; 

Id viri est officium ; fletus muliebri ing^nio additust " 



INTRODUCTORY 



the death of his son Ajax, says that, when he sent 
him to Troy to fight for his fatherland, he knew 
that he sent him 

"To deadly strife, not to a festival." 1 

Such a theory as to the limits within which the 
expression of grief ought to be confined would 
of course be adverse to the production of genuine 
tragedy, and would rather favor the rise of those 
so-called tragedies which Seneca under the Em- 
pire wrote for the arm-chair, not for the stage, 
and in which he surfeited even the Romans with 
stoical dignity and superhuman impassibility. 

Again, comedy suffered from the fact that Rome 
would tolerate no invasion of private life, as is 
shown by the fate of Naevius, who expiated by 
his death in African exile an attack on the pow- 
erful family of the Metelli, and an allusion to the 
private life of the victor of Zama. Besides, these 
importations from Greece were supported only by 
the taste, perhaps the affectation, of the rich and 
noble ; the people preferred rope-dancers, as we 
learn from the Prologue to the "Hecyra" of Ter- 
ence. Hence we find that the actors despised 
the verdict of the masses, and were ambitious to 
appeal to the classes alone. Arbuscula in Horace 2 
is indifferent to the hisses of the populace if she 
can only secure the applause of the Knights. 

1 " Ego cum genui turn moriturum scivi et ei rei sustuli. 

Praeterea ad Trojam cum misi ob defendendam Grae- 

ciam 
Scibam me in mortiferum bellum non in epulas mittere." 

2 Satires, I. 9. 76. 



STRANGE FEATURE IN LATIN TRAGEDY 7 

However, that, in spite of these very serious dis- 
advantages, Tragedy at least was held in „ , 

° . Early 

no mean estimation at Rome, we gather success of 
not only from the great wealth and posi- 
tion attained by the tragic actor Aesopus, but also 
from the distinct testimony of Horace, who tells 
us 1 that houses thronged with spectators of high 
position witnessed the reproductions of the works 
of the Attic dramatists in Rome, where the classes, 
not the masses, seem to have been able to make 
or mar the fortunes of the stage. 

One of the strongest arguments against the au- 
thenticity of the early history of Rome Difficulty in 
is that, though the duration of the mon- o^lS* 1 * 
archy was about two hundred and forty Tra s ed y- 
years, yet this period is said to have embraced 
only seven reigns, an average of about five and 
thirty years to each reign. The history of Latin 
Tragedy presents a similar difficulty : three names, 
Ennius, Pacuvius, and Attius, stand to represent 
a period of more than a hundred years, from the 
first Africanus to Sulla. Comedy, not being so 
distinctly an imported and transplanted novelty, 
but having a somewhat congenial soil in a coun- 
try where Fescennine interludes, masques, and 
Atellane plays were indigenous, would doubtless 
have taken deeper root but for the stern prohibi- 
tion of those personalities without which the comic 
drama can hardly become truly popular or racy of 
the soil. 

1 Epistles, II. i. 60. 



8 INT ROD UCTOR Y 

The Graeco-Roman drama of Plautus and Ter- 
Pkutus and ence was really sad undtr its superficial 
Terence. gaiety. The complete separation of po- 
litical from private life, the isolation of women, 
the dullness of home, the consequent craving for 
coarse excitement, the demoralization of the slave 
into his master's pimp, — all these traits are com- 
mon to the Rome of Plautus and Terence and 
to Greece in her decline. The two playwrights 
felt this. Terence dealt with the phenomena pre- 
sented to him after the manner of Horace, with a 
smile and a shrug ; Plautus, in the fashion of Juve- 
nal, with fierce indignation and disgust. The fa- 
Their bulae palliatae of Plautus and Terence 

successors. were succeeded by fabulae togatae, deal- 
ing with a lower stratum of society ; and finally 
by tabemariae, which went lower still, until the 
trabeatae were introduced under Augustus, and 
took in hand a very high class of society again. 
This whole distinction between plays vulgar, mid- 
dle-class, and aristocratic betrays a want of that 
dramatic sense which ought to tell the playwright 
that in the true drama of life these classes are 
mingled and fused, and not distinctly ticketed and 
kept apart. Hence Rome produced no Euripides, 
no Shakespeare, no Moliere. 

The so-called togatae are represented by a num- 
ber of names more or less obscure, — 

Verses 

ascribed to Luscius, Attilius, Titinius, Turpilius, 

Trabea. As we shall not have occasion 

to return to these shadowy personalities again, it 



ATELLANE PLAYS 



may be interesting to quote here the extremely 
clever verses which Muretus wrote and submitted 
to Joseph Scaliger, who pronounced them to be by 
Trabea : — 

" Here, si querellis ejulatu fletibus 
Medicina fieret rrraeriis mortalium, 
Auro parandae lacrimae contra forent. 
Nunc haec ad minuenda mala non magis valent 
Quam naenia praeficae ad excitandos mortuos. 
Res turbidae consilium non fletum expetunt. 
Ut imbre tellus sic riganda est mens mero, 
Ut ilia fruges haec bona consilia efferat." x 

The manner is perfect ; but it is no disrespect to 
Scaliger to point out what modern scholarship 
has observed, but what in his day was unknown, 
that the modern origin of the verses is betrayed 
by several violations of the proper caesura in dac- 
tyls and anapaests, and by the fact that a writer of 
Trabea's time could not have made the first sylla- 
ble of lacrimae long. 

After them came the remodeled Atellane plays 
under Sulla. In them originally the place Ateikne 
was Campania, the persons were con- plays * 
ventional types, and the language even is said to 
have had a tinge of Oscan. The scene was not 

1 " Sir, if by cries and groans and floods of tears 
Mortals could minister to human ills, 
Then every tear were worth its weight in gold. 
But tears no more can mitigate man's woes 
Than keens and dirges can bring back the dead. 
Affliction asks philosophy, not tears. 
Moisten your clay with wine, from which will spring 
Sound sense, as from the rain earth's kindly fruits." 



I O INT ROD UCTOR Y 

Rome, but some municipal town, and the dialogue 
was mainly improvised. Sulla turned these At el- 
lane interludes into regular plays like the come- 
dies of Plautus and Terence, and is said even to 
have composed some Atellane farces himself. 
The chief authors of these were Pomponius and 
Novius, in whose time circumstances rendered 
attacks on provincial oddities more piquant, be- 
cause Italy, having saved Rome from the Cartha- 
ginians and the Cimbri, began then to ask from the 
Imperial City something more than the privilege 
of shedding her blood in Rome's defence ; and no- 
thing pleased the Romans more than to be reminded 
how absurd were the pretensions of these provin- 
cials, these rustics, these innrbani, to be on a foot- 
ing of equality with Rome. In the hands of Pom- 
ponius and Novius the Atellane passed from half 
Oscan patois to Latin, from prose to verse, from an 
improvised sketch to a written play, from a cast 
consisting of amateur young aristocrats to a com- 
pany of regular actors. In these plays Pappus, 
Bucco, Maccus, and Dorsennus were used as stalk- 
ing-horses for the ridiculing of certain social 
types ; for instance, Pappus praeteritus, or " The 
Disappointed Candidate," dealt with the humors 
of elections, and to some extent foreshadowed the 
Harlequin, Clown, and Pantaloon of modern pan- 
tomime. They were followed by the mimes of 
Laberius and Publilius Syrus. When the mimes 
fell into disrepute, as if to illustrate the sensible 
admonition of their creator, Laberius, — 



THE MIMES II 



" I 've had my day, and so will my successor. 
None have a property in public favor," l — 

the Atellane play was revived by one Mummius 
under Tiberius. It became disgustingly coarse and 
licentious. We learn from Martial 2 that under 
Domitian a real crucifixion was introduced into 
such a play. 

The* mimes were interludes, like the Atellane 
plays, but no longer dealt with the con- 

1 J ° The mimes. 

ventional personages of whom Rome had 
become weary. The virtue of the Roman lady, so 
jealously guarded (as we shall see) in the comedies 
of Plautus and Terence, was no longer maintained 
in the mime. Valerius Maximus tells us that the 
town of Massilia showed her regard for morality by 
prohibiting the mime, and Ovid 3 points out how 
absurd it is to allege the licentious tendency of his 
poetry in an age when that form of the drama was 
patronized. 

You are no doubt familiar with the story how 
Caesar, offended by some independent Anecdote 
verses of Laberius which seemed to be c b a °s ar an d 
aimed at himself, compelled the veteran Laberius - 
mime-writer, though a knight, to take part as an 
actor in one of his own farces ; and you are ac- 
quainted with the manly lines in which, in his pro- 
logue, Laberius expressed his sense of the affront 
which had been put upon him : — 

" I, who 've lived sixty years without a stain, 
Who left my house this morn a Roman knight, 

1 " Cecidi ego, cadet qui sequitur, laus est publica." 

2 De Sped. VII. 8 Trist. II. 497. 



1 2 INT ROD UCTOR Y 

Go back a player ! Certes, I have lived 
A day too long." l 

But I may be permitted to remind you of an an- 
, . . ecdote handed down by Macrobius and 

And about J 

Cicero and others touching an amusing exchange 
of words between Laberius and Cicero. 
When Laberius, on the occasion just referred to, 
was about to resume his seat among the spectators 
after playing his part, he found no room in the 
places reserved for the Equites. "We should be 
glad," said Cicero, who was present, "to make room 
for you, if we were not so much crowded." "That 
must be a strange sensation for you," replied La- 
berius, " seeing that you are so accustomed to sit 
on two stools at once." This little incident per- 
haps accounts for Cicero's disparaging allusion to 
Laberius in a letter to Cornificius : 2 " I have grown 
so inured to boredom that I can sit out the pro- 
ductions of Laberius and Syrus." Horace's well- 
known sneer at Laberius is perhaps only a sign 
that the court poet did not forget that Laberius 
had offended the founder of the Empire by such 
free speeches as : — 

" Many he needs must fear whom many fear." 3 

It may amuse us here to recall a few of the 
maxims ascribed to Publilius Syrus, as we shall not 

1 " Ego bis tricenis annis actis sine nota 

Eques Romanus a lare egressus meo 
Domum revertar mimus. Nimirum hoc die 
Uno plus vixi mihi quam vivendum fuit." 

2 Fam. XII. io. 

8 " Necesse est multos timeat quern multi timent" 



PUBLILIUS SYRUS 13 

again return to this subject. Perhaps among the 
best are, "The beggar's wants are few, p u biiiius 
the miser's countless ; " : " Good com- Syrus - 
pany's the best lift on a journey;" 2 and a very 
ingeniously expressed sentiment which cannot be 
Englished, as we have no words answering to the 
distinction between cuivis and cuiquam. The mean- 
ing is little more than " What has happened once 
to one man may happen again to another." The 
expression is very deft, — 

" Cuivis potest accidere quod cuiquam potest." 

Trimalchio, in the " Satyricon " of Petronius Ar- 
biter, estimates the respective merits of Cicero and 
Syrus, and decides that Cicero has the greater 
power of expression (disertiorem), but that Syrus 
has greater distinction of style {Jtonestiorem). It 
is uncertain whether the very elegant iambics in 
condemnation of Roman luxury, attributed there 
by Trimalchio to Syrus, are really by him, or are 
a clever parody by Petronius. 

Before this epoch, epic poetry had taken its rise 
with Naevius and Ennius, who, succeeded „ 

Poetry of the 

by Lucilius, also laid the foundations of Caesarian 
Satire. ' But it was in the Caesarean age 
that the yield (proventus, as Pliny calls it) of poetry 
became really copious. That period was marked 
by a mania for writing verses, in spite of the civil 
and political disorders of the time. Caesar himself, 

1 " Desunt inopiae pauca, avaritiae omnia." 

2 " Comes facundus in via pro vehiculo est." 



14 INTRODUCTORY 

on his way to Spain, wrote an Iter, or " Impressions 
of my Journey." Many of the orators mentioned 
in the "Brutus" were poets also. Hirtius chroni- 
cled in verse the Istrian War. Furius Bibaculus 
essayed the task, which Marcus Cicero abandoned 
and his brother pursued, of describing the cam- 
paigns of Caesar in Gaul. Calvus, whom Horace 
to his lasting disgrace couples with Catullus in de- 
preciating both, sang Quintilia in rivalry to Lesbia, 
and strove with an " Io " to emulate that divine 
poem, the " Peleus and Thetis." Helvius Cinna for 
nine years touched and retouched his poem entitled 
" Smyrna," dealing with an unpleasant theme like 
that of Shelley's " Cenci " until the work became 
unreadable, and his conduct proverbial through a 
verse of Horace's. It is but fair to add that the 
"Smyrna" won the pronounced approval of the 
coming poet Catullus. 

But of all the writers in verse, save only those 
Cicero's two, Lucretius and Catullus, who from 
poetry. ^q time of Nepos down to the present 

day have been recognized as the "bright particu- 
lar stars " of the Caesarean epoch, by far the most 
important and interesting, not only for his real 
poetical ability but for the influence which he 
exercised on subsequent Art, is the great orator 
and consummate man of letters, M. Tullius Cicero. 
As both his powers and his influence in this depart- 
ment of literature have been very greatly underrated, 
I may be excused for dwelling a little on this phase 
in the genius of a man who might almost have 



CICERO'S POETRY 



been called "myriad-minded." If Cicero does not 
deserve the name as well as Shakespeare, at all 
events he has a far better title to it than that 
unknown bishop to whom the term /ivpcovov? was 
originally applied by Photius. Plutarch describes 
Cicero as having been alike the first poet and the 
first orator of his age, — a criticism which startles 
us when we remember the gibes of Juvenal and 
Martial, and the unfavorable comments of Seneca, 
Gellius, and Tacitus. It is true that as a poet he 
was eclipsed by Lucretius and Catullus, but he had 
first been eclipsed by a greater than these, — by 
himself. He was his own greatest rival, suppositi- 
ous sibi ipsi, in the phrase of Martial. The glories 
of the advocate, the orator, the philosopher, the 
unrivaled essayist and letter-writer, made his poetic 
bays pale. Before the rise of Lucretius and Catul- 
lus, there is little doubt that Cicero was the poet 
of his age. Even in his early works, "Marius" and 
the " Phaenomena " and " Prognostics l ' we find a 
new and very noticeable polish and harmony of ca- 
dence, which must have had a great effect on the 
nascent muse of Lucretius and Catullus. In the 
poem on his consulate, whence come the unlucky 
verses which in the minds of most people stand by 
themselves for the poetry of Cicero, — 

" O fortunatam natam me consule Romam ! " — 
and 

" Cedant arma togae, concedat laurea laudi, " — 

we find an expression on which Virgil himself 
could not have improved when he calls the comets 



1 6 I NT ROD UCTOR Y 

claro tremulos ardore, " quivering with lucid fire." 
The jingle for which the first of these verses has 
been condemned can hardly have been due to want 
of ear. The writer who is so fastidiously sensitive 
to euphony that he will not allow words which 
might conclude a hexameter, as forming a dactyl 
and spondee, to stand together in his prose works, 
is not likely to have fallen inadvertently into the 
collocation of natam natam. Indeed, Quintilian 
quotes a similar assonance in a letter of Cicero's 
to Brutus, 1 and we find pleniore ore in Off. I. 61. 
Moreover, one must remember how easy it would 
have been to transpose natam and Romam. If 
Cicero deliberately accepted this assonance, one 
would be disposed to think that his authority 
might well be set against the judgment of Quintil- 
ian and Juvenal, not to speak of later critics. The 
vanity of the verse is but a vice of the age in 
which the austere Caesar could send such a piece 
of fustian as veni> vidi, vici to the senate, and es- 
cape the ridicule with which such a dispatch from 
the seat of war would now be received. 

As regards the second of the verses so gener- 
ally and so inconsiderately condemned, it may be 
remarked that the expression, cedant arma togae, 
would not have seemed ridiculous to Cassius, who 
uses a very similar phrase in a letter to Cicero, 2 

1 " Ciceroni in epistulis excidit res mihi invisae visae stmt, 
Brute." — Quintil. IX. 41. 

2 "Est enim tua toga omnium armis felicior. " — Fam. 
XIII. 13. 1. 



CICERO'S POETRY 1 7 

nor to Pliny, who writes of togae triumphum lin- 
guaeque lauream. Caesar thought highly of the 
poetry of Cicero, who sometimes betrays some of 
the characteristic traits of the " fretful tribe." 
He is very anxious to know what people think of 
his verses, especially what Caesar thinks. In a 
letter to his brother he says of the poem which we 
have been discussing : " What is Caesar's opinion 
about my poem ? The first book, I know, he deems 
excellent, — not surpassed even in Greek literature ; 
the rest, up to a certain point, he seemed to 
think — what shall I say ? — slipshod. Find out for 
me, is it the style or the subject he does not like ? " 1 
We read with pleasure in another letter 2 that 
Cicero abandoned his intention of collaborating 
with his brother Quintus in a poem on Caesar's 
" Gallic Wars," because he "feels no heart for the 
theme," ad est IvOovo-iao-ixos. He is too good a re- 
publican to enjoy strewing flowers en the path of 
Caesar to the throne. The Augustans felt no want 
of heart for the praise of Caesar, nor did Cicero 
show any lack of enthusiasm when he eulogized Cato 
or thundered against Antony. A passage from 
the same unlucky poem, too long to quote, chal- 
lenges comparison with the splendid verses in the 

1 Q. Fr. II. 15. (16.) 5. The words reliqua ad quem- 
dam locu7ii paOvfiSrepa may mean " the rest of his expressions 
were not so enthusiastic," but the broad meaning of the pas- 
sage is not affected by the interpretation of the particular 
words. 

2 Q. Fr. III. 4.4. 



1 8 INTRODUCTORY 

first Georgic in which Virgil recounts the portents 
which presaged Caesar's death. It is true that 
there is in Cicero an excessive illustration of the 
same point. This is a characteristic of the early 
style, and shows him inferior as an artist to Virgil. 
But it is one thing to be inferior as an artist to 
Virgil — a proposition which may be predicated 
of nearly every poet who has ever written — and 
quite another to be, as Juvenal describes Cicero, 
so wretched a poetaster that, if in eloquence he 
had been on the same level, he might have re- 
garded with indifference the dagger of Antony, 
since he would have been too insignificant to excite 
the resentment of any one. 

But by far the finest poems of Cicero are those 
Cicero's splendid translations from the Greek 
translations ^vjj-^ w hich he has embellished his rhe- 

rrom the 

Greek. torical and philosophical works. There 

is in the " De Divinatione," II. §§ 63, 64, a very 
fine rendering of the portent from which Calchas 
inferred the duration of the siege of Ilium — the 
devouring of the little birds by the serpent ; 1 and 
the song of the Sirens 2 is translated with great 
taste in " De Finibus," V. § 49. But conspicuous 
above the rest are the speeches of Prometheus on 
the Caucasus, and of Hercules dying on Mount 
Oeta 3 — versions from Aeschylus and Sophocles 
which used to be ascribed to Attius, as being quite 
beyond the unhappy author of — 

1 Iliad, II. 299-330. 2 Odyss. XII. 1 84-1 91. 

8 Tusc. II. §§ 19-25. 



LUCRETIUS AND CATULLUS 



" O fortunatam natam me consule Romam," 
but which are now rightly attributed to Cicero, and 
which no judicious critic can read without recog- 
nizing a dignity and even splendor of diction not 
surpassed in Latin literature. With these we 
would couple a beautiful rendering from the 
" Cresphontes" of Euripides, 1 in which Cresphon- 
tes declares that — 

" When a child 's born, our friends should throng our halls 
And wail for all the ills that flesh is heir to ; 
But when a man has done his long day's work, 
And goes to his long home to take his rest, 
We all with joy and gladness should escort him." 

These vigorous and admirably tasteful render- 
ings from the Greek drama by Cicero possess a 
further and unique interest as standing midway 
between the roughness of the old Latin drama and 
the far less powerful — almost feeble — elegance 
of Varius and Ovid. 

But now appear two great geniuses who would 
have eclipsed Cicero as a poet, even if he T 

Lucretius 

had not already eclipsed himself. Lu- and 
cretius gave the world a philosophical 
poem which has never been surpassed, and Catullus 
showed for the first time what truly epic Latin hex- 

1 " Nam nos decebat coetu celebrantes domum 
Lugere ubi esset aliquis in lucem editus, 
Humanae vitae varia reputantes mala; 
At qui labores morte finisset graves 
Hunc omni amicos laude et laetitia exsequi." 

Tusc. Disp. I. § 115. 



20 INTRODUCTORY 

ameters were, in the divine poem of " The Mar- 
riage of Peleus and Thetis." Catullus is some- 
times described as the forerunner of Lucretius, but 
he is not so either chronologically or psychologi- 
cally. The great work of Lucretius has been well 
called " an improvisation of genius ; " and it has all 
the merits, together with some of the defects, of 
its high-engendered origin. Catullus, on the other 
hand, weighs his words, sometimes holds himself in, 
and, as Horace says, plays the part of the polished 
talker who husbands his powers, and sometimes 
deliberately forbears to exercise them. Catullus 
is in fact already an Augustan, and leads us by 
an easy transition to the Augustan Age. 

Augustus encouraged poetry with political views. 
The so-called Ausristan poets were al- 

The Augus- & r 

tan College most a college, or at least a select liter- 
ary hierarchy like the French Academy. 
Valerius Maximus speaks of " a College of Poets " 
(collegizim poetarum), and its president seems to 
have been Spurius Maecius Tarpa, of whom we 
hear in Cicero's letters and in Horace. Patronage 
was not a new thing in the time of Augustus. 
Scipio, Laelius, Memmius, were the forerunners 
of Maecenas, Pollio, Messalla. But Augustus en- 
couraged it not only by private hospitality, but by 
making it a guild, by multiplying copies of stand- 
ard works, and by establishing libraries and encour- 
aging the sale of books : we learn that there was a 
bookseller at Utica. It has been said that the 
Bourbons forgot nothing and learned nothing. 



LOST AUGUSTAN POETS 21 

The first Roman emperor, unlike them, was an 
apt pupil in the school of life, and ever ready to 
learn and to apply its lessons. But, like them, he 
forgot nothing. Least of all did he forget that 
there was once a young man called Octavius and 
afterwards Octavian. He remembered that young 
man too well to neglect any means of obliterating 
his memory. Poetry, it struck him, not history, 
was the screen that lay most ready to his hand. 
History could not but hint at least at the unscru- 
pulous treachery of that young man's triumvirate, 
the cruelty of his parricidal massacres, the inglori- 
ousness of his military career; his domestic infamy. 
Poetry could leave all these untouched and dwell 
on the reign of peace, the restoration of religion 
and morality, the standards of Crassus retrieved, and 
the boundaries of the Empire enlarged. Among 
all his Academicians he met none so skillful to 
harp on this string as Virgil and Horace, as that 
worshiper of Nature whom he drew reluctant 
from his rustic retreat, and that grandson of a 
slave whom he found content with a small clerk- 
ship in town. To quote the expression of M. 
Taine, Roman Poetry first passed under the yoke 
of Greece, then under the yoke of Augustus. 

The Augustan Age, strictly so called, as regards 
poetry, may be said to run for us from Lcst Angus- 
Virgil to Ovid, who had just seen Virgil tan P oets - 
and no more. 1 But a multitude of Augustan poets 
have perished, and are revealed to us only by 
i « Virgilium vidi tantum." — Trist. IV. 10, 51. 



22 INTRODUCTORY 

grammarians, who quote from their works to es- 
tablish some usage. Cornelius Nepos gives us a 
sad example of how contemporaneous renown may- 
fail to make any impression, even the slightest, on 
posterity. He points, in emphatic and carefully 
weighed terms, to one of whom he writes, " I think 
I can well assert that he is our most brilliant poet 
since Lucretius and Catullus." To whom is he re- 
ferring ? To one L. Julius Calidus, of whom we 
know nothing, except that there was once such a 
person. Tibullus 1 assures us that no one came 
nearer to the immortal Homer (aeterno propior 
non alter Homero) than one Valgius. Paterculus 
places beside Virgil a certain Rabirius, of whom we 
know only two things, that he composed a poem 
on the Alexandrine War, and that Ovid 2 gives 
him the praise of being "mighty-mouthed " (magni 
oris), the very epithet which Tennyson bestows 
on Milton in the fine experiment in Alcaic verse 
beginning : — 

" O mighty-mouth'd inventor of harmonies, 
O skill'd to sing of Time and Eternity ! 
God-gifted organ-voice of England, 
Milton, a name to resound for ages ! " 

We are told, too, of others who at least chose 
fine themes, and themes neglected by their betters. 
Some one named Cornelius Severus, in a poem 
on the Sicilian War, rendered due homage to the 
greatness of Cicero, who is not mentioned by 
Virgil, Horace, or Ovid, or even alluded to, unless 
1 IV. i, 1 80. 2 Pont. IV. 16, 5. 



LOST AUGUSTAN POETS 23 

we are to see an allusion, which would not be very 
flattering, in a passage in the sixth book of the 
"Aeneid." 1 We also read that a Pedo Albinova- 
nus related before Tacitus the voyages of Ger- 
manicus in the Northern Seas ; and that a certain 
Cotta wrote a "Pharsalia" under Augustus, in 
which we may infer that he embraced the cause 
espoused by the gods, not that which found favor 
with Cato, and glorified the winning side. 

But of all these once eminent poets and poems 
we know next to nothing ; and still less about the 
tragedies of Pollio and Varius, the comedies of 
Fundanius, the elegies of Gallus, the epics of Va- 
rius and Rabirius. What little information we 
do possess we owe to chance allusions in Virgil, 
Horace, Seneca, Quintilian, Velleius, and the 
Grammarians. 

Thus Time scatters about his poppies of oblivion, 
and poets who in their own time had the repu- 
tation of a Milton or a Tennyson have now be- 
come a mere name, — so many letters in a certain 
order. 

These considerations invite a reference to an 
ingenious speculation of the brilliant M Pat]Vs 
French critic, M. Patin. We are far view of the 

extant 

from sure, he points out, that we possess Augustan 
in our so-called Augustan poets a type poe ry ' 
of the poetry which really was most characteristic 
of that age. Nay, more, there are reasons to be- 
lieve that time has spared to us what was rather 
1 Line 849, orabunt causas melius. 



24 INTRO D UCTOR Y 

a recoil from the prevailing genius of the time. 
These reasons may be classified under two heads. 
First, our Augustan poetry is remarkable for its 
carefulness. Now, Horace is never tired of urging 
the necessity of careful writing. We have often 
heard that " easy writing is hard reading," and that 
"Time will have nothing to do with anything pn> 
duced without his aid." These may be called the 
favorite texts of Horace when he preaches on Art, 
and undoubtedly his protests are directed not 
against his predecessors but against his contempo- 
raries. It was because they were written without 
any real carefulness and limae labor that so many 
of the poems of his time were ephemeral, and re- 
sembled the garlands in the elegy of Propertius 1 
which withered on the brows of the revelers, and 
shed their bloom into the wine-cup as it went 
round. Now Horace often speaks of his own as- 
siduous care, and rests on it his hope of immortal 
fame. Propertius foretells Virgil's deathless re- 
nown as the guerdon of the same quality. We 
know that Virgil thought that he had not bestowed 
nearly sufficient care on his epic, and wished to 
destroy it ; and Ovid tells us 2 that with his own 
hand he burned the "Metamorphoses." After- 
wards, on learning that the work still survived in 
other copies, he begs his readers to remember that 
it had not received from him the last touch {sum- 
mam manum), and announces that he craves not 
praise but pardon (et veniam pro laude peto). 
1 II. 14, 52. 2 Trist. I. 7, 15. 



LOST AUGUSTAN POETS 25 

Thus it would appear that the poets whom we 
especially denominate Augustan in one important 
quality represent not the spirit of their age but rather 
a recoil from it. And, further, we learn from vari- 
ous hints in our Augustans that there existed under 
Augustus and his immediate successors a court 
poetry which was official and conventional, and 
was devoted to the laudation of the Emperor and 
his exploits in commonplace and mythological fash- 
ion. Our poets more or less ironically protest their 
inability to rise to the height of such an argument. 
Horace declares that such a theme is for a Varius. 
Propertius tells how Apollo touched his ear and 
admonished him to beware of strains so ambitious. 
Virgil opines that we have had enough of Pelops 
and his ivory shoulder, of the relentless Eurystheus, 
and of the altars of the infamous Busiris. 1 Our 
Augustan poets betake themselves to the Alexan- 
drines, Theocritus and Callimachus. The elegy of 
Propertius 2 to the court poet Ponticus, author of a 
dead and buried "Thebais," is an excellent expres- 
sion of the relation of our Augustans to the court 
poetry of the Augustan Age. 

It seems, then, highly probable that what we call 
the Augustan poetry was really not the poetry 
characteristic of that epoch, but even a recoil from 
it, and a timid but decisive protest against it. The 
more credit to our Augustan poets, who taught 
their countrymen what was true urbanitas. The 
expression urbanitas always has a very definite 
1 Georgics, 3, 4. 2 I. 7. 



26 INTRODUCTORY 

meaning in the mouth of a Roman, to whom the 
City was as supreme as to a modern Parisian. 
Urbanitas was the essential condition of literary 
acceptability. But its meaning changed in every 
generation. Lucilius is called perurbanns by Ci- 
cero, and inurbanus by Horace, yet each of these 
critics knew exactly what urbanus meant, and 
applied it correctly according to the view of his 
age. 

It may be said that Virgil wrote to order. So 
Virgil and ne did, but the theme suited the poet as 
0vid - well as the time. The court of Augus- 

tus was as corrupt and blase as that of Ptolemy, 
for which Theocritus sang the delights of rural life. 
And Virgil had a personal interest in the old stock 
from which "stout Etruria grew" (fortis Etruria 
crevit). In his epic Virgil succeeded in produ- 
cing, in an age no longer epical, a brilliant reflec- 
tion of the poetry which characterizes the epoch 
of childish belief and insouciance. Virgil has bor- 
rowed much from Homer, but he has taken from 
him nothing that he has not made new. He is 
the cloud which receives the light of the sun, and 
gives it back with the colors of the rainbow. 
Victor Hugo has said that Virgil is the moon of 
Homer, and truly there is in him a tender mel- 
ancholy which takes the place of the dazzling 
brilliancy of the Greek. His pious reproduction 
of the age of childish belief has suggested to crit- 
ics a comparison of Virgil with Tasso. Ovid 
was the Ariosto of the Augustan age, who took 



POST-AUGUSTAN POETRY 2J 

mythology no more seriously than Ariosto took 
chivalry. 1 

At Rome it seemed as if the stream of epic poetry 
would never run dry. On it rolled, carry- p 0S t-Augus- 
ing on its unrippled surface to the gulf tan P oetr >'- 
of oblivion Memnonids, Perseids, Heracleids, The- 
seids, Thebaids, Achilleids, Amazonids, Phaeacids, 
without number. The river of Time has happened 
to throw up to us a few spars from the wreckage, 
a few poets not, perhaps, much better than those 
whom it has engulfed, — Valerius Flaccus, Silius 
Italicus, Claudian, all of whom, together with Sta- 
tius and even Lucan, Scaliger said that he would 
gladly give for a complete Ennius : " Utinam ha- 
beremus Ennium integrum et amisissemus Luca- 
num, Statium, Silium Italicum, et tous ces gascons 
la." The last word, "gasconaders," which is often 
quoted as garqons, "lads," was used by Scaliger to 
mark the difference between the natural simplicity 
of Ennius and the inflated diction of the Silver 
Age. Henceforth, though every year produces, in 
Pliny's phrase, its crop (proventum) of poets, Latin 
poetry is successful only in satire and epigram. 
1 " In non credendos corpora versa modos." — Trist.W. 64. 



II. 

EARLY LATIN POETRY. 

Roman poetry may be said to begin in 514, with 
character-is- Livius Andronicus, who translated the 
early Roman Odyssey into Saturnian verse, — a work 
poetry. about which we know nothing that is 

interesting except that Horace probably had the 
same feeling towards it as most schoolboys now 
have towards Horace, for it was the book which 
he had to study at school under the ferula of the 
proverbially severe Orbilius. 

In the very early poets of Rome, what most 
strikes us is a strange unevenness of execution. 
They do not seem to have caught any apprehen- 
sion of that subtle quality which should distin- 
guish even the humblest poetry from the very 
most ambitious prose. In our own literature in- 
stances of this insensitiveness to the essential 
difference between poetry and prose are very rare, 
and they hardly ever coexist with occasional ele- 
vation. In early Latin poetry, lapses into mere 
prose are common, and yet we often meet real 
poetry side by side with them. Brilliant gifts of 
expression and true elevation of sentiment are 
found coexisting with abject humbleness of style, 
or even insensibility to the very existence of such 
a thing as style. 



VERY EARLY ROMAN POETRY 29 

Macaulay quotes from Blackmore a so-called 
poem which is certainly marked by a "plentiful 
lack " of inspiration : — 

" Fancy six hundred gentlemen at least, 
And each one mounted on his capering beast ; 
Into the Danube they were pushed by shoals." 

But this attempt at description, bald as it is, al- 
most soars in comparison with some specimens 
of early Latin poetry which have come down to 
us ; for instance, this passage from the epic of 
Naevius on the Punic War : — 

" The Romans cross to Malta, harry the place 
With fire and sword, settle the enemies' business ; " l 

or : — 

" Marcus Valerius consul leads a brigade 
On a campaign ; " 2 

or this couplet from Ennius : — 

" Years seven hundred, more or less, have passed 
Since Rome with auguries august arose ; " 3 

a passage which, though it rises a little in the ex- 
pression " auguries august," certainly creeps in the 
cautious accuracy of " more or less," and reminds 
us of a Dublin story, how a certain solicitor, in 
challenging to a duel another member of his own 
profession, invited him to meet him in the Phoenix 

1 " Transit Melitam Romanus insulam integram omnem 

Urit populatur vastat, rem hostium concinnat." 

2 " Marcus Valerius consul partem exerciti 

In expeditionem ducit." 

3 " Septingenti sunt paulo plus aut minus anni 

Augusto augurio postquam inclita condita Roma est" 



30 EARLY LATIN POETRY 

Park " in the Fifteen Acres, be the same more or 
less." 

Again, Ennius, after a really fine verse invoking 
the Muses, goes on to explain that "Muses" is a 
Greek word corresponding to the Latin Casmenae. 
This is what strikes us in early Latin poetry, — 
real distinction and utter poverty of style side by 
side and hand in hand. Place beside the bald and 
uncouth verses quoted just now from Naevius 
those fine Saturnians of his : — 

" They fain would perish there upon the spot, 
And not come back to meet their comrades' scorn ; " 1 

and beside the Ennian passage put that grand 
utterance which has been compared to the voice 
of an oracle, and which kindled the enthusiasm of 
the inspired Virgil : — 

" Broad-based upon her men and principles 
Standeth the state of Rome ; " 2 

and we shall then see clearly this strange quality 
which distinguishes the early Latin poets from 
those of Greece, and other nations too, — that they 
were content to creep, though they knew what it 
was to fly, and that they seem hardly to be aware 
when they are on the ground and when in the 
clouds. 

Quintilian 3 relates an anecdote which shows in 
what honor the epic of Ennius was held. One 

1 " Seseque ei perire mavolunt ibidem 
Ouam cum stupro rebitere ad suos populares." 

2 " Moribus antiquis stat res Romana virisque." 
8 VI. 3. 86. 



POPULARITY OF THE ENNIAN EPIC 3 1 

Sextus Annalis brought some charge against a 

client of Cicero's, and in the course of Anecdote 

the trial proudly demanded, " Have you illustrating 
A ■ J • >j ^ e p°p u kr- 

anything to say about Sextus Annalis ? " ity of the 

That is, " Have you any charge to bring nmane P lc - 
against my character ? " But the words nwn quid 
potes de sexto Annali are susceptible of a quite 
different meaning. Cicero pretended to under- 
stand him to mean, " Can you repeat anything out 
of the sixth book of the Annals ? " " To be sure 
I can," at once replied the consular wag, 1 and he 
thundered forth the sonorous line, 

" Quis potis ingentes oras evolvere belli ? " 

to the enthusiastic delight of his audience and the 
whole court. Opinion about Ennius underwent a 
steady change in successive ages. Lucretius calls 
him " immortal," aeternus ; in Propertius he begins 
to be "rough," hirsutus ; Ovid characterizes him as 

"In genius, mighty, but in art unskilled ; " 2 

Martial complains that people are so tasteless that 
they will read Ennius though they have Virgil ; in 
the time of Silius Italicus, Ennius is so completely 
portion and parcel of the past that Silius intro- 
duces him as a character into his poem. 

But Ennius, interesting though he is as the 
founder of the Roman epic and of satire, must no 
longer engage our attention, except in so far as he 
affected the early Latin drama, which is the chief 

1 Scurra consularis was a favorite sobriquet for Cicero. 

2 " Ingenio maximus arte rudis." 



32 EARLY LATIN POETRY 

subject of this lecture. As the real founder of 
Roman poetry Quintilian finely says of him, in 
a well-known passage, 1 that we should reverence 
him as some sacred grove of venerable antiquity 
whose grand old trees have more majesty than 
beauty. 

A generation ago, historians of Latin literature 
Roman usually discussed the question, Why had 

trage y. Rome no tragedy ? Such critics could 
find no Roman tragedy because they looked for it 
only in the declamations of Seneca, which probably 
were never put on the stage. They did not go so 
far back even as the " Medea " of Ovid and the 
" Thyestes " of Varius, which Quintilian put on a 
par with the Attic drama, or the tragedies of 
Pollio, which Virgil and Horace thought worthy 
of the Sophoclean buskin. Still less did they 
think of turning their eyes to the stage of En- 
nius, Pacuvius, and Attius. It is indeed only com- 
paratively recently that the efforts of Continental 
scholarship have presented to us the fragments in 
which these dramatists have come down to us in 
such a shape as to render any literary appreciation 
possible. In a foregoing lecture we have adverted 
to certain evidences that tragedy was held in es- 
timation in the Rome of the Ciceronian epoch. 
These evidences were broadly the testimony of 
Cicero and of Horace. Latin tragedy took the 

1 " Ennium sicut sacros vetustate lucos adoremus, in quibus 
grandia et antiqua robora jam non tantam habent speciem 
quantam religionem."' — Inst. Orat. X. i. 88. 



ROMAN TRAGEDY 33 

Greek models in inverse order, and adapted Eu- 
ripides first. The Ennian version is literal, and, 
like Roman comedy, postulates in the audience a 
knowledge of Greek. Sometimes, where we have 
an opportunity of comparing the Latin translation 
with the Greek original, we find the Latin awkward 
and clumsy. A fine passage in the " Iphigenia in 
Aulis " runs : — 

" Oh, what a blessing hath the peasant's lot, 
The happy privilege of uncheck'd tears." 1 

It is hard to give in English the Ennian version 
of it without exaggerating its homeliness, but it 
may perhaps be rendered : — 

"In this the peasant holdeth o'er the king, 
The one may weep, the other may not well ; " 2 

The Greek and Latin passages agree in being both 
perfectly plain and simple ; but the Ennian is al- 
most vulgar, and its simplicity is that of " Rejected 
Addresses : " — 

"Jack 's in a pet, and this it is : 
He thinks mine came to more than his; " 

while the simplicity of the Greek is that which so 
deeply affects us in a great line in Webster's 
" Duchess of Main : " — 

" Cover her face : my eyes dazzle : she died young." 
Perhaps we might venture to say that the vulgarity 
in the Latin lies in the word honeste ; to weep is 

1 7} dvcryeveia 8' ws exei ri xpV<Ti/J.ov 
KaX yap SaKpvaai paSicas avro'is ex el> 

2 " Plebes in hoc regi antistat loco : licet 

Lacrimare plebi, regi honeste non licet." 



34 EARLY LATIN POETRY 

not consistent with a king's position at the head 
of society. 

It is interesting to detect in these very ancient 
Passages and somewhat rude efforts of a nation 
anticipating j ust emerging from absolute illiteracy 
Xmodem something parallel to our own literature ; 
literature. something to remind us that there are 
touches of nature which make generations kin, how- 
ever widely sundered in space and time. 

" What in the captain 's but a choleric word, 
That in the soldier is flat blasphemy," 

is a very true reflection of Shakespeare's ; and a 
similar thought must have presented itself to the 
mind of Ennius when he wrote : — 

" To ope his lips is crime in a plain burgher." i 
The whole spirit of the fine poem, 

" How happy is he born and taught 
Who serveth not another's will ! " 

resides in the Ennian verse, 

" Most free is he whose heart is strong and clean." 2 
The fierce question of Shylock, 

" Hates an}' man the thing he would not kill ? " 
is anticipated in 

" Fear begets hate, hate the desire to kill ; " 3 
and "A friend in need is a friend indeed" finds a 
literal counterpart in 

" Amicus certus in re incerta cernitur." 

1 " Palam muttire plebeio est piaculum." 

2 " Ea libertas est qui pectus purum et firmum gestitat." 

8 " Quern metuunt oderunt quern quisque odit periisse ex- 
petit." 



PACUVIUS 35 



It is strange to meet as early as in Ennius a maxim 
which modern novelists would do well to lay to 
heart : — 

" A little moralizing 's good, — a little : 
I like a taste, but not a bath of it." 1 

Pacuvius was the rival and nephew of Ennius. 
Like Euripides, he was a painter as well 

Pacuvius. 

as a poet, and " Pictor, the surname of 
the Fabii, shows that this art was then held in 
high esteem. He learned the bitterness of being 
eclipsed by a younger rival, Attius, and retired to 
Tarentum (the ideal retreat of Horace), there to 
spend the closing years of a long and distinguished 
life. Aulus Gellius tells us that there he was visited 
by Attius, who read to him his "Atreus." The 
old poet found in it elevation and brilliancy, but 
detected a certain harshness and unripeness. " So 
much the better," said Attius. "The mind is like 
a fruit, harsh while it is growing, but mellow when 
it attains maturity. If it be soft too soon, it is 
spoiled before it ripens thoroughly. I would fain 
have something to grow out of." This is a very 
just remark. The young man whose essay shows 
nothing turgid, no ungraceful ornament or flashy 
rhetoric, will never do much as a writer. Dr. John- 
son's advice to his young friend, to cut out all the 
fine passages, illustrates his ticklish temper rather 
than his sound judgment. On the whole, one would 

1 " Philosophari mini necesse, at paucis nam omnino haud 
placet, 
Degustandum ex ea, non in ea ingurgitandum censeo." 



36 EARLY LATIN POETRY 

prefer to see a very young writer rather a dandy 
in his manner. The affectations are annoying, but 
he will probably grow out of them, if he happens 
not to be a prig. It is well that he should feel it 
necessary to dress his thoughts before he brings 
them into company. Ribbeck calls Pacuvius the 
freedman of Euripides, because, though mainly de- 
pendent on Euripides, he modifies the art of the 
Greek poet with far greater boldness than Ennius 
or Attius. 

The less agreeable features in Pacuvius are his au- 
dacity in coining monstrous compounds, 
like repandirostmm and incurvicervicum, 
and his poverty of invention. The latter failing is 
revealed by the fact that we find in his fragments 
traces of three different and separate storms. No 
doubt he excelled in this kind of description, and 
so he recurs to it whenever he wants an effect. 
His popu- W e nave abundant proof of his popular- 
larity. j t y Plautus parodies him more than 

once ; Lucretius J borrows his expression, hoc cir- 
cum supraq?ce, " the spacious firmament on high ; " 
and it was during the performance of a play of his 
that the actor who was playing the part of the 
sleeping Ilione fell into a slumber which was not 
feigned, while twelve hundred spectators joined in 
the appeal of Catienus on the stage, — the appeal 
to Ilione to awake. The way in which Horace 2 
relates the anecdote shows that the plays of Pacu- 
vius must have been very popular, and very famil- 
1 V. 319. 2 Satires, II. 3, 60. 



ATT/ US 37 



iar to the audiences of the time. A fine passage 
in the " Medus " (son of Medea by Aegeus 1 ) proves 
that Pacuvius is not merely one who can produce 
ingenious philosophical reflections and vigorous 
descriptions. The portrait of the unhappy de- 
throned Aeetes, a kind of ancient Lear, 

" With sunken eyes, and wasted frame, and furrows 
Worn by the tears adown his pallid cheeks," 2 

is the work ot a poet who can raise pity and terror, 
and worthily describe human passion and suffer- 
ing. His last triumph was at the funeral of the 
murdered Caesar in the year of the city 710. 
Among other songs sung in honor of the dead 
was one from his " Armorum Judicium." There 
was a sad appropriateness to the occasion in the 
cry of Ajax, 

" To think I saved them but to murder me!" 8 

Velleius gives Attius the palm among the tragic 
poets. He took Aeschylus for his model, 
not Sophocles or Euripides, as did his 
predecessors, but seems to have largely adopted 
the practice called contaminatio> and to have fused 
together different dramas, and even different au- 

1 If Pacuvius remembered Eur. Med. J22, he must have 
given to <ppovdos in that verse the improbable and unexampled 
sense ascribed to the word by Elmsley. 

' l " Refugere oculi, corpus macie extabuit, 

Lacrumae peredere humore exsangues genas." 

But it is not absolutely certain that these verses, quoted by 
Cicero {Tusc. III. 26), are to be referred to Pacuvius. 

8 " Men' servasse ut essent qui me perderent ! " 



38 EARLY LA TIN POETRY 

thors. Thus we find in his " Armorum Judicium," 
which he borrowed from Aeschylus, the well-known 
verse, taken by him from the " Ajax " of Sophocles, 
and afterwards adapted from him by Virgil : — 

" Be thine thy father's might, but not his fate." 1 

He also draws upon Homer, and even Apollonius 
Rhodius, whose very spirited description of the as- 
tonishment of the Colchian shepherds at the first 
sight of a ship seems to be reproduced in a passage 
cited by Cicero (" De Nat. Deor." II. 8g). 2 

Like Ennius and Pacuvius, Attius was of humble 
birth, the son or grandson of a freedman. But the 
obscurity of his birth was to him no " invidious 
bar ; " to quote a verse of his own : — 

"A man may dignify his rank ; no rank 
Can dignify a man." 3 

We have already heard his confident answer to the 
aged Pacuvius, and we are told by Valerius Maxi- 
mus 4 that when Caesar entered the Collegium 
Poetarum, of which we have already spoken as 
being a kind of ancient analogue of the French 
Academy, Attius did not rise. He acknowledged 
the superior birth and rank of Caesar, but added, 

1 " Virtuti sis par, dispar fortunis patris." 

2 " Tanta moles labitur 

Fremebunda ex alto ingenti sonitu et spiritu," 

and the following verses to 

" Vagant timore, pecuda in tumulis deserunt." 

Ribbeck, p. 158, 391-410. 
8 " Homo locum ornat, non hominem locus." 
* III. 7. 1. 



LATIN TRAGIC POETS COMPARED 39 

" Here the question is, not who has most ances- 
tors, but who has most works to point to." 

Ennius excelled in sententious gravity, pathos, 
and naturalness ; Pacuvius, in elaboration T . 

Latin tragic 

of style, which earned him the name of poets com- 
docttis, and which sometimes, as in his 
monstrous compounds, degenerated into pedantry 
and affectation. The strength of Attius lay in his 
spirit and elevation of style, for which Horace 
called him alius, and Ovid animosus. His Oderint 
dum metuant, " Let them hate me, so they fear me 
too," is a thunder- word, and has ever been a favorite 
quotation with tyrants from Tiberius to Bismarck. 
The elevation of Attius is very marked. The 
"Atreus," which he read to Pacuvius, Elevation 
begins with a stately passage much ad- of Attlus - 
mired by Cicero, Quintilian, and Seneca: — 

" I 'm Lord of Argos, heir of Pelops' crown, 
As far as Helle's sea and Ion's main 
Beat on the Isthmus," x 

a passage which strikes us by the weight of names 
great in myth-land and hero-land, and produces a 
vague impression of majesty, like Milton's 

" Jousted in Aspromont or Montalban, 
Damasco or Morocco or Trebizond, 
Or whom Biserta sent from Afric's shore, 
When Charlemagne with all his peerage fell 
By Fontarabia." 

1 " En impero Argis sceptra mihi liquit Pelops 
Qua ponto ab Helles atque ab Ionio mari 
Urgetur Isthmos." 



40 EARL Y LA TIN POETR V 

We are told by Plutarch that when the great 
tragic actor Aesopus uttered these words he en- 
tered so keenly into the spirit of the passage that 
he struck dead at his feet a slave who approached 
too near to the majesty of royal Argos. 

Again, do not the following lines strongly recall 
the wise and sober but lofty dignity of Tennyson's 
"King Arthur"? 

" Foul shame I hold it that the blood of queens 
Should foully mix itself and make the breed 
Of royal stock a question." 1 

And we meet now and then a sentiment quite in 
the vein of the " Idylls : " — 

" For him is pity, to whose lew estate 
A noble mind lends lustre." 2 

In some places the boldness of the Attian diction 
touches the borders of bombast, as when he says : — 

" From the reverberating cliffs around 
Starts Echo musical with clangorous peal 
Of startled laughter ; " 3 

or when Thyestes is described as 

" Tomb of his brood devour'd." 4 

The sound common sense which underlies this 

1 " Re in summa summum esse arbitro 

Periclum matres conquinari regias, 
Contaminari stirpem ac misceri genus." 

2 " Hujus demum miseret cujus nobilitas miserias 

Nobilitat." 

3 " Simul et circum magna sonantibus 

Excita saxis suavisona Echo 
Crepitu clangente cachinnat." 

4 " Natis sepulcrum ipse est parens." 



COMMON SENSE OF ATT I US 4 1 

excitability of spirit has already been illustrated by 
his interview with Pacuvius. A further „ 

Common 

instance of it is given us by Ouintilian. 1 sense of 
So great an admiration, he tells us, was 
felt for the forensic powers shown in the Attian 
tragedies that his friends asked him why he did 
not become an advocate. " Because," he replied, 
"in my plays the speakers say what I please, and 
so the other characters can perfectly demolish 
their arguments ; but in the courts, on the con- 
trary, I find that my adversaries invariably say 
the very things I would rather they had left 
unsaid." 

But in Attius, as in all the Latin tragic poets, 
we have to deplore a certain want of con- _ , 

Defects in 

trol. The easy, delicate grace of the Latin 
Greek style was unattainable by the 
Latin dramatists, and they tried to supply its place 
by a vigor and amplitude which are excessive and 
out of place. You will remember the opening 
verses of Euripides' " Phoenissae," which may be 
rendered : — 

" O sun, that thro' the fires of the firmament 
Cleavest thy way, and in thy golden car 
Launchest the flames from thy swift coursers' feet, 
Ill-starr'd the ray thou sheddest once on Thebes." 

How does this appear in Attius ? — 

" O sun, that in thy glistening chariot borne, 
With coursers swiftly galloping, dost unfold 
A sheet of gleaming flame and burning heat, 

1 IV. 13, 43- 



42 EARL Y LA TIN POETR Y 

Why with such baleful auguries and omens 
Adverse giv'st thou to Thebes thy radiant light ? " 1 

The grace is lost ; the attributes of the sun, which 
are merely glanced at (but in most stately phrase) 
in the Greek, are detailed and catalogued in the 
Latin. This is the main characteristic of early 
Latin tragedy. It is too much " in King Cambyses' 
vein/' It substitutes strength for sweetness, heat 
for light. Our own literature supplies an analogous 
phenomenon and in a still more exaggerated degree. 
The cry "he abhorreth not evil" in the Psalms is 
grand in its simplicity ; it becomes in the New 
Version by Nathaniel Brady and Nahum Tate (who, 
I regret to say, was a scholar of Trinity College, 
Dublin, and afterwards Poet Laureate in the reign 
of Charles II.), 

" His obstinate, ungenerous spite 
No execrable means declines; " 

and "Why do the heathen rage, and the people 
imagine a vain thing?" swells (yet shrinks) into 

" With restless and ungovern'd rage 
Why do the heathen storm, 
And in such vain attempts engage 
As they can ne'er perform ? " 

Like Latin tragedy, the version of Tate and Brady 
tried to make repetition and exaggeration compen- 
sate for the absence of grace and taste. 

1 " Sol qui micantem candido curru atque equis 
Flammam citatis fervido ardore explicas, 
Quianam tarn adverso augurio et inimico omine 
Thebis radiatum lumen ostentas tuum ? " 



LATIN COMEDY 43 

The first glimpse we obtain of a national comedy 
in Italy is in those charming sketches Latin 
which Horace and Virgil give us of rus- comed y- 
tic merry-makings at harvests and vintage festivals, 
in which not only rude dances found a place, but 
a kind of rough banter in Saturnian verse was ex- 
changed between peasants wearing masks of bark 
rudely improvised for the occasion. But this " Fes- 
cennine license," even when developed into the 
''■medley" which Livy describes at the beginning 
of the seventh book of his history, still wanted an 
essential quality of a play, namely, unity of plot, 
until it began to draw on the resources of the 
Greek drama. Thus, in the words of Livy a mere 
masque or revel gradually had become a work of 
art, 1 and a regular class of actors, histriones> arose. 
From improvised chants without dialogue or plot 
to a regular comedy such as those of Plautus and 
Terence is a very long step. Hampered as it was 
by police regulations, and laboring under the ban 
of public opinion, the histrionic impulse of Italy 
would never have taken this step by itself. It was 
forced to take its comedy straight from Athens, 
and to infuse into it a spirit distinctly antagonistic 
to the national mind of Rome. Perhaps it is in 
this quality in Roman comedy that we are to find 
a justification for the puzzling observation of Quin- 
tilian that " comedy is the weak point of Latin lit- 
erature." 2 Probably, however, it is safer to attrib- 

1 " Ludus in artem paulatim verterat." 

2 " In Comoedia maxime claudicamus," 



44 EARLY LATIN POETRY 

ute Quintilian's criticism to some revulsion of taste 
against comedy strictly so called which seems to 
have occurred under the Empire. 1 It is hard, of 
course, for us to institute a comparison between 
Latin comedy and tragedy, because while we have 
between twenty and thirty Latin comedies and not 
one complete Greek exemplar with which to com- 
pare them, in tragedy, on the other hand, we have 
an abundant supply of the Greek models, but not 
one single perfect, or even nearly perfect, Latin 
copy. 

The most remarkable feature in Latin comedy 
Characters- is the fact that the scene was invariably 
of C La a tin reS laid out of Rome > usually at Athens, and 
comedy. fae dramatis personae were Greeks, not 
Romans ; so are the costumes and the coinage. In 
all the plays of Plautus and Terence we do not find 
mention of a single Roman coin ; when Romans 
are mentioned they are called barbari, and Italy is 

1 We recall how strangely Horace depreciates both the 
metrical skill and the humor of Plautus, and perhaps we 
can infer a preference on the part of Horace for the mime, 
which superseded the comic muse, when we remember that 
the mime had for its butt the oddities of provincial life, and 
that these moved the mirth of Horace and his friends on the 
journey to Brundisium, when they laughed at the decoration 
of the ex-clerk who was praetor of Fundi, and who was so 
proud of his purple robe, his broad stripes, and his pan of 
coals. Indeed, other writers under the Empire show their 
appreciation of this rather low form of humor. Persius (I. 
129) and Juvenal (X. 10 1) laugh at the provincial magistrates, 
who are so proud of the office which gives them the right to 
break half pints if they are not of the statutable capacity. 



LATIN COMEDY 45 

barbaria. Whether this was a police regulation 
which insisted that the scene should be laid abroad, 
lest Romans or Roman institutions should seem to 
be satirized, or whether it resulted from the inca- 
pacity of the Roman playwrights to rise from mere 
translation to adaptation, it is certain, at all events, 
that the Roman poets themselves accepted the 
situation and boasted of it. In the prologue to the 
" Menaechmi " Plautus declares : — 

" We lay the scene of all the play at Athens, 
To make the drama seem more Greek to you." 1 

But still they aimed at presenting Roman society 
as it unfolded itself to their eyes. Plautus makes 
the Grex at the end of the " Bacchides " protest 
that he would not have dreamed of making a son 
rival to his father in a disgraceful intrigue, were it 
not that such a case had come under his own per- 
sonal observation ; and Cicero 2 declares, " I hold 
the aim of the drama to be to hold up a mirror 
to our manners, and to give us the express image 
of our daily life." This attempt at the same time 
to give the piece a foreign character, and yet to 
bring the scenes home to the Roman audience, has 
introduced certain confusions which give consequent 
a very odd semblance to Latin comedy. confuslons - 
Roman gods and ritual, Roman legal and mili- 
tary terms, find their way into this Greek world ; 
aediles and tresviri jostle agoranomi and demure hi ; 

1 " Omnis res gestas esse Athenis autumant 

Quo illud vobis Graecum videatur magis." 

2 Rose. Am. XVI. 



46 EARL Y LA TIN POETRY 

a speaker in a play in which the scene is laid in 
Aetolia, Ephesus, or Epidamnus will remark that 
he has just come from the Velabrum or the Capito- 
lium. We remember how, in " Hamlet," the grave- 
digger sends his fellow workman from Denmark to 
an English village to fetch him a stoup of liquor ; 
and how Shakespeare introduces English names and 
characters into Athens in the " Midsummer Night's 
Dream." But these lapses of memory, exceptional 
in Shakespeare, are the rule in Latin comedy, which 
addressed an audience by no means familiar with 
the foreign world which was its scene, though we 
must presume them to have had considerable fa- 
miliarity with the Greek tongue ; else surely Plautus 
would not have made puns unintelligible without 
a knowledge of Greek, or introduced three new 
words * coined from the Greek into one verse in the 

" Miles Gloriosus." Horace not only de- 
Horace's t J 

criticism nies to Plautus humor and metrical skill, 
but he charges him with a desire to make 
money as quickly as possible, an indifference to 
the requirements of true art, and a consequent 
tendency to hurry with undue haste to the denoue- 
ment of his plays, a fault which he says he has in 
common with the Sicilian Epicharmus. It is true 
that the play is often wound up very suddenly. 
Indeed, in the " Casina " the epilogue naively in- 
forms us that the denouement will take place in- 
side. 2 But, on the other hand, the " Curculio " 

1 II. 2. 58: Euscheme, didice, comoedice. 

2 The mention of the Casina suggests to me to bespeak 



MOTIFS OF PLAUTUS' PLAYS 47 

is excellently constructed, and so are the "Epi- 
dicus," which he tells us he loved better than his 
own life, and the " Pseudolus" and " Truculentus," 
which Cicero informs us were the work and the 
favorites of his old age. It is curious that these 
are plays which turn on an attempt to Motifs of 
cheat or overreach (frustratio), not on hls P la y s - 
the more familiar theme of love or gallantry (ama- 
tid). These two motifs, or a fusion of both, as 
when a man is deprived of his mistress by some 
clever stratagem, are by far the commonest in 
Plautus. Two plays, the "Trinummus" and the 
"Captivi," strike out a new line, and depict, one, 
the noble love of friend for friend, the other the 
fidelity of slave to master. The " Rudens " turns 
on a shipwreck, and the right of asylum. The 
"Captivi" and "Bacchides" are perhaps the best 
constructed of the plays, and Plautus regrets that 
he cannot find more models for a play like the 
former, where the moral tendency is so excellent. 

attention to a passage in that play where the Ambrosian 
palimpsest has restored to us a text which probably conjec- 
ture would never have hit on, but which seems absolutely 
certain. The pretended bride, who was really a stout young 
slave in a woman's attire, is described as having put down 
her foot on the toe of one of her escort, institit plantain j 
but how does the verse go on ? 

" Institit plantam quasi jocabor." 

The words quasi jocabor could not be explained. The Am- 
brosian codex gives us quasi Luca bos, ''like an elephant," 
the very word which we want, and the very word which Lu- 
cretius uses for " an elephant." 



48 EARLY LATIN POETRY 

The " Miles" is spoiled by the introduction of the 
speech of Palaestrio, explaining the plot 
in con- in the manner of a prologue, after the 

action has begun. So in the " Cistella- 
ria " the play opens with an admirable dialogue 
between the girls Silenium and Gymnasium and 
an old procuress, and it is only in the third scene 
that the goddess Auxilium speaks the prologue. 
Another great blot on the construction of the 
" Miles " is the very long though very clever dia- 
tribe of Periplecomenus on the blessings of celibacy 
and the hollowness of society, which for one hun- 
dred and seventy verses completely stops the action 
of the piece. We must, however, remember that 
these defects in construction would not be at all so 
noticeable in plays which really rather resemble 
our opera bouffe than a modern comedy, — plays 
in which by far the most of the scenes were sung 
to the accompaniment of an instrument of music, 
and in which there was no division into acts and 
scenes save where the exigencies of the plot re- 
quired that an actor should leave the stage at the 
end of one scene, and appear again at the begin- 
ning of the next, on which occasions a flute-player 
entertained the audience while the stage was 
empty. 

In some respects the "Amphitruo " is the most 
original of the plays of Plautus. Whether 

Amphitruo. ° r J ' . 

it is to be classed as z.fabula Rhintonica 
or as a IXaporpayaSia (both have been suggested), it 
seems to demand some classification which will dis- 



POLITICAL LIFE IN LATIN COMEDY 49 

tinguish it from the other plays. "A Roman tone 
pervades it," as Professor Palmer remarks. " In 
reading the account given by Sosia of the campaign 
against the Teleboae, we feel as if Plautus had 
versified a page of some old Latin Annalist. The 
ultimatum of Amphitruo, with its demand for resti- 
tution and threat in case of refusal, the pitched 
battle and crushing defeat of the enemy, the slay- 
ing of the commander-in-chief by Amphitruo's 
own hand, — all these are in real Livian style." 
Alcmena is a high type of a Roman wife, and a 
risqui subject is treated with a delicacy which 
contrasts most favorably with the work of the 
modern imitators, Moliere and Dryden. 

It would be, of course, quite impossible, in the 
space at our disposal, to analyze, or even charac- 
terize, all the Latin comedies which have come 
down to us. We may, however, inquire in a gen- 
eral manner how, on the whole, they deal with the 
different factors of society which were presented 
to them, how they deal, that is, with political, civil, 
and domestic life. 

Political life is, owing to the circumstances 
which surrounded the composition and „ ,. . , 

1 Political 

production of ancient comedy, but lightly life in Latin 
touched. We find references to the un- 
fairness of the aediles in awarding the literary 
prizes, and to the summary proceedings of the tri- 
umviri, or police of Rome. These, however, are 
chiefly in prologues, and we cannot be sure that 
all the prologues of Plautus are not quite post- 



50 EARLY LATIN POETRY 

Plautine ; some of them demonstrably are. They 
are subservient to the explanation of the plot, like 
those of Euripides, but generally are disfigured by 
cumbrous bantering of the audience. The pro- 
„ , losrues of Terence, on the other hand, 

Prologues °, 

of piautus which are undoubtedly genuine, under- 

and Terence. , 1 , - . . , . . 

take the defense of the poet s own lit- 
erary views, and rebut the strictures of adverse 
critics, thus resembling rather the parabasis of 
Greek comedy than the prologues of Euripides. 
But much more indicative of the political views 
of Piautus than his gibes at aediles and triumviri 
is the bitter and sustained attack on the vices of 
the governing classes pervading his plays, in which 
we so often hear that the aged reprobate, who is 
as ridiculous as he is vicious, is a pillar of the state, 
a column of the senate, a protector of the poor. 
It is strange that such assaults on a class should 
have been permitted in a city where personal allu- 
sion of any kind was punishable by law. 

To pass, then, to the civil and domestic spheres, 
civil and we have very little description of profes- 
domestic life. s i ona i or mercantile life as such. The 
mercator might just as well be anything else as a 
merchant ; we hear only of his amatory intrigues. 
We have, however, in the " Rudens " a description 
of the hardships of a fisherman's life which re- 
minds us of an idyll of Theocritus, and in the 
"Menaechmi" we have a physician. Here and 
elsewhere we find that physicians, then as now, 
were prone to use terms derived from the Greek. 



CIVIL AND DOMESTIC LIFE 5 I 

In the " Curculio " x even the slave Palinurus has 
enough knowledge of the medical art to tell Cap- 
padox, who complains of an acute pain in his liver, 
that he is suffering from a morbus hepatarius. The 
letters of Cicero show us that in his time physi- 
cians wrote their prescriptions in Greek, as they 
now do in Latin, and that it was customary to 
speak of ailments and their cures by their Greek 
names. There is in the " Poenulus " a strange 
profession, that of the professional perjurer. The 
most common callings are those of the banker and 
money-lender, the parasite and the pimp, around 
whom cluster the professional beauties, who are by 
no means as good as they are beautiful. Ladies, 
on the other hand, ingenuae, whether matron or 
maid, are always virtuous, though often very disa- 
greeable, as Artemona in the "Asinaria." The 
picture of the girls who are in the train of the 
pander is very strange. Philematium in the " Mos- 
tellaria," though belonging to this class, is almost 
charming, with her girlish love for dress and her 
sincere affection for Philolaches. Philocomasium 
in the " Miles " has enough grace to prefer Pleu- 
sicles to the wealthy captain, and to be faithful 
under strong temptation. Melaenis in the " Cis- 
tellaria," Philenium in the "Asinaria," and Lem- 
niselene in the " Persa " are all capable of a disinter- 
ested love. But other Plautine girls are redeemed 
only by their cleverness, and the candor (if that is 
a redeeming point) with which they avow their 
1 II. i. 24. 



52 EARLY LATIN POETRY 

depravity. Plautus himself, both in the " Miles " x 
piautine and in the " Cistellaria," 2 dwells on the 
adv™seTo heartlessness of such women, and he 
morality. constantly moralizes on the wretched 
end to which a life of wicked indulgence leads, 
with a moral fervor which probably suggested to 
Lucretius his terribly powerful treatment of the 
same theme in the fourth book (verses ii2off.). 
Even in the case of abandoned srirls whom we 
might almost regard as attractive, Plautus never 
lets us forget what they are. The atmosphere is 
not adverse to morality, as is that of the French 
novel. Such women are not intended to attract 
one, like the Dame aux Camellias or Ninon de 
l'Enclos. There are slaves of all kinds, but, with 
the exception of Tyndarus in the " Captivi " and 
Stasimus in the "Trinummus," they are the vilest 
of the vile, and seek a revenge in the abasement of 
their masters for the ill-treatment and oppression 
which is their lot. 

Plautus is as ready as Cicero to apply to Rome 
Essentially the Frenchman's aphorism about Paris : 
urban. "On ne vie qu'a Paris, et Ton vegete 

ailleurs." He speaks in a tone of contempt of the 
Italian towns, and especially makes the Praenes- 
tines his butt for their habit of docking the first 
syllable of a word, and thus turning ciconia, " a 
stork," into coma. "Do you think you are in the 
country?" asks one slave of another, in the " Mo- 
stellaria," when the latter is making an unseemly 
uproar in the street. 

i III. i. 190. 2 I. 1.66, 



PLAUTUS AND TERENCE COMPARED 53 

The late Professor Sellar remarks that Plautus 
could not describe a gentleman. " No- „ 

° Compared 

thing can be meaner than the conduct with 
of the second Menaechmus, who is in- 
tended to interest us, in his relations with Erotion; 
and this failure is equally conspicuous in another 
of his favorite characters, Periplecomenus " in the 
"Miles," whose indecorous geniality is to us some- 
what repulsive. In this respect, as in the gusto 
with which he dwells on the pleasures of good 
living, Plautus reminds us of Dickens more than 
of any other humorist. We cannot but think of 
the very thick strokes and glaring colors of Dick- 
ens's character-painting, of his Quilps and Peck- 
sniffs, when we find Euclio the miser, in the "Au- 
lularia," carefully preserving the parings of his 
nails, and regretting his tears on account of the 
waste of water which they entail. 

All these types which we have been examining 
are considerably different in Terence. _ 

J Compared 

The braggart captain is only vain, not a with 

Terence. 

fool, and is more like the FalstafT of 
" Henry IV." than the FalstafT of the "Merry- 
Wives of Windsor." The parasite is simply a flat- 
terer. The slave is not an oppressed creature at 
war with society, but a well-treated domestic who 
puts his shrewdness at his master's service, and 
often shows devotion and honesty. There is no 
longer a sharp distinction between meretrix and 
ingenua, except in the unfortunate condition of the 
former. She is as refined in her manners as her 



54 EARLY LA TIN POETRY 

more reputable sister, and generally an unexpected 
disclosure at the end reveals that she is really a 
lady, and had been changed at birth. The husbands 
of Terence are far better husbands, and the wives — 
for instance, Sostrata in the '-' Hecyra " — are more 
amiable than those of Plautus. His young men are 
rather lovers than libertines, and his old men show 
them a better example. Terence, it may be said, 
painted men as they ought to be, Plautus as they are. 
It is strange that Sedigitus places Terence only 
sixth in his list of comic poets, which he 

Terence. 

heads with Caecilius, Plautus, and Nae- 
vius. Cicero 1 refers to Terence as the true model 
of Latin ity, and allows that in this matter the 
authority of Caecilius is small. The ancients made 
Caecilius first in the choice of plot, Plautus in dia- 
logue, Terence in delineation of character. But so 
high was the estimate of the elegance of the Te- 
rentian style that a theory resembling that of 
certain ingenious American writers, concerning 
Shakespeare and Bacon, was actually broached in 
the ancient world about Terence, who was said to 
have been chosen by Laelius, or even Scipio him- 
self, as the vehicle through which their clever 
comments on society should be presented to the 
His refine- world. The refinement of Terence is 
ment. certainly very marked. Naevius, for in- 

stance, makes a son frankly and brutally pray for 
the death of his parents : — 

" I wish the gods would take my parents both." 2 

1 Att. VII. 3. 

2 " Deos quaeso ut adimant et patrem et matrem meos. , ' 



MEYER'S VIEW OF TERENCE 55 

How different is the tone of Ctesipho in the 

"Adelphi!" 1 — 

" Would that my sire would so fatigue himself — 
So as to do his health, of course, no harm — 
As for the next three days to keep his bed." 

Even the modern world has something to learn 
from the cultured African. Moliere, in his " Ecole 
des Maris," restores the Naevian brutality of the 
passage to which I have referred ; and Jonas Chuz- 
zlewit complains that his father, in living so long, 
is flying in the face of the Scriptures. The very 
refinement of Terence has, in the minds of some 
writers, been prejudicial to his fame. An ingen- 
ious critic, M. Meyer, thinks that Ter- „ 

J Meyer's 

ence was spoiled by the patronage of view of 
Scipio and Laelius. His life was too 
easy and luxurious. The pampered freedman lost 
his powers of observation, and described a society 
such as existed only in his own enervated imagina- 
tion. The atrium is transported into Arcadia, and 
one might suppose it was the reign of Numa or 
Evander. It is, however, very doubtful whether 
an observer of society does not see better from 
above than from below, and it is a barren kind of 
criticism which, instead of asking what were the 
powers of the dramatist as revealed in his work, 
pursues rather the inquiry what his circumstances 
ought to have made them. 

We are told that the aediles had the right of 
refusing or accepting plays. There seems to have 
1 IV. i. 3. 



56 EARLY LATIN POETRY 

always been some one to whom they referred the 
Literary matter, and who did the part of the Lord 
imdefthe Chamberlain in England. Tarpa was the 
Republic. referee in Cicero's time, as we learn from 
a letter of Cicero to Marius. 1 Luscius of Lanuvium 
seems to have discharged a somewhat similar func- 
tion in the time of Terence, and to have regarded 
his young rival with jealousy, and accused him of 
plagiarism. The answer of the Latin dramatist is 
characteristic. He declares he has not used the 
works of his Latin predecessors. He does not 
even know them. He claims for himself the merit 
of complete originality, because he has taken his 
plays solely (and wholly) from the Greek. 

A well-known story records what a generous 
critic of his " Andria " Terence found in 

Caecilius. . ■ 

Caecilms, who certainly had not much 
in common with Terence, and rather exaggerated 
than modified the coarseness of Plautus. Caecilius 
introduces a son declaring that it gives piquancy 
to an intrigue if one's father is a bear and a miser ; 
it is no fun if he is generous and kind ; and he 
makes a husband say of his wife, — 

"She ne'er was really charming till she died." 2 

Other coarse and disgusting fragments express 
brutally that indifference to his wife which the 
Plautine husband thought it humorous to dwell 
on. But we can forgive Caecilius much when we 

1 Earn. VII. i. 

2 "Placere occepit graviter postquam est mortua." 



AFRANIUS 57 



meet our old familiar gallery claptrap sentiment 
that — 

" Many a good heart beats under a threadbare coat." l 
Afranius, the chief of the writers of the so- 
called tosratae. is the poet most frequently 

d ' ; J Afranius. 

quoted, next after Plautus and Terence. 
Unlike Terence, he confesses that he draws on 
the Latin as well as the Greek drama, and of Ter- 
ence he declares that he has no second, 2 and that 
every word of his is genuine wit. 3 Cicero ascribes 
to Afranius that thorough knowledge of human life 4 
which was so completely the appanage of Menan- 
der that a well-known verse declared it was hard 
to say whether Menander copied life, or life Me- 
nander. This is, perhaps, the meaning of the 
Horatian remark that the toga of Afranius fitted 
Menander. It is in his refined and tender view of 
the relation of father and son that Afranius most 
resembles Terence. A father, in the " Adelphi," 5 
welcomes the faintest sign of grace in his son, and 
exclaims, — 

" He blushes ! All will be well." 

So, in Afranius, when a son cries, "Miserable 
wretch that I am ! " the father comforts himself 
with the reflection that if his son expresses regret 
his shortcomings are more than half atoned for. 

1 " Saepe est etiam sub palliolo sordido sapientia." 

2 " Non similem dices quempian." 

3 " Ouidquid loquitur sal merum est." 

4 " Illud a vita ductum ab Afranio." — Tusc. IV. 45. 

5 IV. 5. 10. 



58 EARLY LATIN POETRY 

And he, like Terence, condemns those fathers who 
seek " to inspire their sons with fear rather than 
respect." 1 

After Afranius, Latin comedy merged into the 
taberuaria, then the mime, then the revived Atel- 
lane play, which ultimately itself gave way to the 
mime again under the Empire. The remark of 
the judicious Quintilian, already quoted, makes it 
hard for us to feel sure that fortune, which has 
given us only fragments of tragedy, has done the 
best for us in sparing to us so many comedies ; 
but of one source of congratulation, at least, we 
may feel pretty certain, — the portion of comedy 
which has survived is surely the fittest. 

1 " Ubi malunt metui quam vereri se ab suis." 



III. 

LUCRETIUS AND EPICUREANISM. 

Epicureanism is now no longer a hypothesis or 
a doctrine. It is a name given to a man's Epicurean- 
character, not to his beliefs. It is an doctrine 
elegant malady of the soul ; a laziness dead - 
and self-indulgence glorified by culture and refine- 
ment ; a term devised to mitigate the word " self- 
ish " when applied to the well-to-do; a euphemism 
for incapacity when it is not too ungraceful, just 
as "kleptomania" is a euphemism for dishonesty 
when dishonesty has plainly no motive. Epicure- 
anism now awakens no enthusiasm, and seeks to 
make no proselytes. 

But, though Epicureanism is dead, it by no 
means follows that the poem of Lucre- Sources of 
tius is only a baseless fabric of errors, [Smof 
possessing an interest merely as an ex- Lucretms - 
ample of a certain brilliant and highly interesting 
vagary of a very finely touched spirit. The part 
of the book that is dead is the system. The inner 
impulse which "rends the veil of the old husk," 
and comes forth as a living flash of light, is the 
enthusiasm of the poet, with his genuine pride in 
the " train of flowery clauses " in which he sets 

forth — 

" The sober majesties 
Of settled, sweet, Epicurean life, 1 ' 



60 LUCRETIUS AND EPICUREANISM 

and his abiding awe for the unchangeable laws of 
Nature. But, above all things else, that which 
keeps the work instinct with life is the fine frenzy 
which clothes every argument, however dry or ab- 
struse, with all the hues of fancy, and which makes 
the poem like nothing else in all literature, if we 
except our own Tennyson's " Two Voices," which, 
though on a very minute scale compared with the 
six books "On the Constitution of Nature," yet 
shows as great and rare an aptitude for — 

" shutting reasons up in rhyme, 
Or Heliconian honey in living words, 
To make a truth less harsh." 

Lucretius has exercised a powerful attraction, on 
. , the one hand, on students of language, 

Varied ' . & & ' 

attractions who find in his poem Latin at a most 

of the poem. . . .. .. . . , 1 

interesting epoch, before it has lost the 
insouciance of childhood, but after it has outgrown 
the helplessness of infancy. On the other hand, 
free-thinkers have congratulated themselves that 
they have found in Lucretius an ally, and have 
eagerly welcomed him into their camp. The phi- 
lologists, lost in admiration of the vase, have hardly 
tasted the strong wine which it holds. The phi- 
losophers have clutched the fruit because they 
thought it was forbidden, and have not paused 
to admire the stately branches or the lustrous 
leaves of the tree on which it grows. But, beside 
these, there is room for a greater interest, both 
literary and psychological, in this High Priest of 
Atheism, this Apostle of Irreligion, who thunders 



GOD AND RELIGION 6 1 

against inspiration like one inspired, and who 
shows all the rapt devotion of a Stephen in his 
denial of immortality, — all the fervor of a Bos- 
suet while he scatters to the winds the last per- 
ished leaves of human hope. We must, therefore, 
on the very threshold of our inquiry into the mind 
of Lucretius, investigate his relation towards God 
and Religion. I have called Lucretius an atheist. 
I am aware that technically this is a misnomer, 
for Lucretius provided in his system for the ex- 
istence of the gods. But why did he recognize 
gods ? What were his gods ? And what was the 
religion which he so bitterly assailed ? 

Epicureanism, which explained the origin of our 
ideas by the theory that material images Relation of 
of things (simulacra), disengaged from Lucretius 

& v " & & towards 

external objects, struck our senses and God and 
thus became cognizable by us, was forced 
to rise from the idea of God which we find within 
us to the existence of gods themselves. Thus Lu- 
cretius was compelled, by his physical theories 
adopted from Democritus and Leucippus, to recog- 
nize gods. But nothing is more formidable to the 
mind than the conception of a Power which is out- 
side and beyond ourselves, which is malevolent to 
us, and which we cannot resist. Such a power were 
the ancient gods to Lucretius ; and the eagerness 
with which he goes out of his way to rail against 
their conventional attributes, and to protest against 
their supposed Providence, suggests to us, not so 
much a philosophic inquirer into the truth of a 



62 LUCRETIUS AND EPICUREANISM 

dogma, or even a fervid preacher demolishing a 
heresy, as some mediaeval enthusiast who believes 
himself to be possessed by a devil, or to be in per- 
petual struggle with a devil for the life of his soul, 
whose reason is convinced that he is saved, but 
whose whole spirit shudders at the thought of dam- 
nation, — a St. Simeon Stylites who strives and 
wrestles till he dies, or one of those whose curse it 
is to suffer 

" Half the Devil's lot, 
Trembling, but believing not." 

For Lucretius is ever and anon haunted by "the 
fear that we may haply find the power of the gods 
to be unlimited, able to wheel the bright stars in 
their varied motion." 1 

The Roman religion, which was originally, as 
Roman in other Aryan nations, worship of the 

religion. powers of Nature, never assumed the rich 
mantle of poetry and legend with which the Greek 
mythology early adorned itself. It took the stamp 
of the national character, and lay chiefly in rigor- 
ous observances showing much fear, little respect, 
and no love for the gods. The Roman legends are 
prosaic and monotonous, nearly always taking the 
form of a hero or benefactor who shows his super- 

1 " Nequae forte deum nobis immensa potestas 
Sit, vario motu quae Candida sidera verset." 

V. 1209. 

In the absence of any really worthy metrical version of 
the poem, I have used nearly always the vigorous and literal 
prose translation of Munro. 



ROMAN RELIGION 63 

human quality by a fire which plays innocuously 
about his head, as in the case of Ascanius in the 
Aeneid, and who finally vanishes, as Romulus dis- 
appeared (11011 comparuit) in the narrative of Livy. 
The sole discovery of Rome in religion is repre- 
sented by the Indigitamenta, or lists of gods at- 
tending every moment of man's life from the cradle 
to the grave. Vaticanus presides over the infant's 
first cry, and Fabulanus over his earliest attempt 
at articulate speech. Educa teaches him to eat, 
Potina to drink, and Cuba to sleep. His goings 
out and his comings in are the special care of 
Abeona and Adeona. The gods of the Roman 
Pantheon are inconveniently numerous. Petronius 
makes the witty, wicked Quartilla remark that 
" the place is so densely populated with gods that 
there is hardly room for the men." 1 Some of the 
deities are mere abstractions, like Salus Populi, 
Securitas Saeculi. Religio comes from the same 
root as diligentia, and means " regularity." There 
is no Greek for it. Certainly not S«o-i8ai/Aoi/ia nor 
evorefteia. The people would stone the gods if they 
offended them, like those savages who thrash their 
idols when they come home after an unsuccessful 
day's hunting. At the death of the beloved Ger- 
manicus, the people rose in fury and threw volleys 
of stones at the temples of the gods. Ovid tells 
us how Numa bargained so shrewdly with Jove 

1 " Utique nostra regio tarn praesentibus plena est numini- 
bus ut facilius possis deum quam hominem invenire." — Sa- 
tyr icon, ch. xvii. 



64 LUCRETIUS AND EPICUREANISM 

that the god at last smiled and gave him his way. 
Cicero relegates religion to the province of his 
wife, and Caesar the Pontifex Maximus denies be- 
fore the Senate the immortality of the soul. The 
"Senatus Consultum de Bacchanalibus " gives us 
a glimpse of the shocking immorality which some- 
times polluted the Roman ritual, and we even 
read 1 of human sacrifices after Cannae. Hence, 
perhaps, the terrible earnestness with which Lu- 
cretius reflects on the sacrifice of Iphigenia, "a 
fair maiden foully murdered by a parent, — a 
maiden more meet for the marriage-bed than the 
bier, — that the fleet might have good hap. Such 
crimes could religion prompt." 2 

Against this shallow, barren, and sometimes 

horrible faith, what wonder that Lucre- 
Attitude 
of Lucretius tius should seize the first weapon that 

came to hand, — ftiror arma ministrat, 
— against a theory of divine government which 
according to him had its rise, not in reason, logic, 
or instinct, but in disgraceful, groveling fear. This 
was the "foul Religion" under which human life 
lay crushed, " a horrid monster lowering over man- 
kind from the sky," against which " the Greek first 
dared to raise his head," and which now lies tram- 
pled under the feet of the Elect, — "a victory," 
cries Lucretius, "that lifts man to the sky." What 
wonder that he should feel indignant that beings 
like the ancient gods should have assigned to 

1 Livy, XXII. 57. 

2 "Tantum Religio potuit suadere malorum." — I. 101. 



ATTITUDE OF LUCRETIUS 65 

them such a stately home as the firmament, in 
which revolve — 

" The Moon, and the Light of the Day, and the Night with 
its solemn fires ? " l 

Bound therefore, as we have seen, by his physi- 
cal theory, to find a place for the gods in his 
system, he gave them a lotus-land in the — 

" Lucid interspace of world and world!" 

He treated them, observes M. Constant Martha, 
as we treat the Nawabs and Nizams of India, whom 
we surround with all the means of luxurious self- 
indulgence, in the well-grounded confidence that 
they will accept that condition in lieu of real 
power. Lucretius is mistaken in praising Epicu- 
rus for his originality. Every one knows that Epi- 
curus borrowed his physics from Democritus and 
his ethics from Aristippus. His originality lay only 
in subordinating in his system physics to ethics, 
and abolishing Providence in the interests of hu- 
manity. Lucretius, following him, established a 
court of gods who reign but do not govern, to 
whom, when he addresses them in prayer, he whis- 
pers, as Voltaire said that Spinosa did, — 

" Je soupc.onne entre nous que vous n'existez pas." 
1 This sublime verse (V. 1190), — 

" Luna Dies et Nox et Noctis signa severa, " 

one of the finest in Latin poetry, reminds us how in another 
philosopher, Kant, the Sage of Konigsberg, "the starry 
heavens above " shared with " the moral law within " the 
power to excite never-failing sentiments of awe and venera- 
tion. 



66 LUCRETIUS AND EPICUREANISM 

These faineant gods are no gods, and it is but 
technically inaccurate to speak of Lucretius as an 
atheist. We shall see afterwards how some idea 
of Providence forces its way, in spite of his system, 
into his naturally religious mind. For the present 
we will leave this part of the subject, first quoting 
the splendid verses in which he gives to these gods 
lip-service in exchange for the ill-used powers 
which he has taken away from them : — 

" The nature of the gods must ever in itself of 
necessity enjoy immortality, together with supreme 
repose, far removed and withdrawn from our con- 
cerns ; for exempt from every pain, exempt from 
all dangers, strong in its own resources, not want- 
ing aught of us, it is neither gained by favors nor 
moved by anger." 1 The spirit of this sublime re- 
nunciation of Providence in the affairs of the world, 
which I have given in the dignified prose of the 
great scholar Munro, is finely caught and blended 

1 " Omnis enim per se divom natura necessest 
Immortali aevo summa cum pace fruatur 
Semota ab nostris rebus sejunctaque longe ; 
Nam privata dolore omni, privata periclis, 
Ipsa suis pollens opibus, nil indiga nostri, 
Nee bene promeritis capitur neque tangitur ira." 
II. 646-651. 

This grand passage was quoted some few years ago with 
great effect by Mr. Gladstone in the House of Commons. 
It will probably stand as the last specimen of that faculty 
for happy quotation from Latin poetry which once adorned 
the debates of that assembly, but which has of late become 
more and more rare in its manifestation, and now seems to 
have completely disappeared. 



ENTHUSIASM OF LUCRETIUS 67 

with a Homeric strain in Tennyson's " Lucre- 
tius : " — 

" The gods who haunt 
The lucid interspace of world and world, 
Where never creeps a cloud, or moves a wind, 
Nor ever falls the least white star of snow, 
Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar 
Their sacred, everlasting calm." 

Ancient Epicureanism arose at a time when Poe- 
try, Art, Eloquence, and all free institu- Enthusiasm 
tions languished under the Macedonian ofLucretlus - 
Protectorate of Greece. It lent itself to the ener- 
vated mind of that nation by the easiness of its 
acquisition and the simplicity of its tenets. Epi- 
cureanism actually discouraged learning, both lit- 
erary and scientific, and took no trouble even to 
defend its own doctrines. Its vohtptas led merely 
to apathy. Its physical system excited no interest 
among its adherents, and was adopted only to facili- 
tate the denial of an overruling Providence and of 
a future life. Towards the end of the Republic, 
Epicureanism prevailed mainly among the upper 
classes. That thoughtless and voluptuous aristo- 
cracy which then was stepping so gaily to its de- 
struction grasped the system as a relief from the 
fear of death, but found that the philosophy which 
only promised annihilation instead had no power 
to give real comfort. Even Lucretius turns but a 
haggard eye on his heaven bare of real gods and 
peopled by indifferent voluptuaries. That is a 
despairing cry of his, that " there is nothing immor- 
tal but Death. " 1 When Lucretius took up this 
1 " Mortalem vitam mors immortalis ademit." — III. 869. 



68 LUCRETIUS AND EPICUREANISM 

dead-alive system, his eager spirit made the dry 
bones live. He breathed upon the system of 
Epicurus, and created a soul under the ribs of 
death. 

Enthusiasm, even when it takes the form of de- 
niustrated s P a i r > is the key-note of the poem. Epi- 
by his curus discouraged the passion of love as 

attitude . & r 

towards the tending to introduce an element of dis- 
quietude into that calm existence which 
is his ideal. Lucretius throws himself upon the 
passion with the fury of a wild beast, and seems to 
rend the limbs of some material victim. Nearly 
as fierce is his hatred of Ambition, and still more 
intense his loathing for Superstition. The feeling 
of conviction with which the early Christians heaped 
contempt on all foregoing systems seems cold and 
lymphatic beside the ardor of Lucretius in pro- 
claiming his faith, and contemning all other wisdom 
His worship as filthy rags. " He was a god, a very 
of Epicurus. god , » { Dem Mefuit D eus ) he exclaims 

of Epicurus in the beginning of the fifth book. The 
fabled inventions of Ceres and Bacchus, the labors 
of Hercules, are as nothing. Man cannot live by 
bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth 
out of the mouth of Epicurus. He discovered 
what is more sustaining than bread and wine. And 
what monster slain by Hercules was so foul and 
ugly as Religion ? The poet boasts that like a bee 
he sucks the honeyed words of Epicurus ; that it 
is his delight "to watch through calm nights" 1 
1 I. 142. 






LUCRETIUS' DELIGHT IN HIS WORK 69 

over his master's scrolls, and in sleep to dream of 
them. 1 Even the poverty of his native tongue 
(patrii sermonis egestas) but seldom gives him 
pause. The rudest instrument is good enough for 
the miner who has just struck a vein of 

' , -, 1 1 1 His delight 

gold. Like a true enthusiast, he exults and belief in 
most in the dullest part of his work. 
When he treats of the atoms, their colors and 
movements, he is ecstatic over his discoveries 
"made by labor, oh, so sweet!" 2 He dismisses 
objections with disdainful curtness. "This is 
folly " (de sip ere est) is a common retort. 3 And he 
claims for the doctrines which he preaches a cer- 
titude greater than that of the oracles of Apollo. 4 
The Apostle speaks of the " beauty of holiness," 
and the Christian hymn cries, " The veil that 
hides thy glory rend." But Lucretius goes beyond 
them. He even fears lest the dazzling radiance 
of Epicurean truth might blind those to whom it 
should be too suddenly revealed. He hesitates to 
rend the veil that hides its glory. He regards with 
trembling awe and half-averted face the transfig- 
uration of Epicurus through the medium of words. 5 
When one reads the rapturous verses in which 
he describes his task of making a harsh TT . 

His 

truth less bitter, likening himself to one "towering 

, -ii 1 • r i passion." 

who smears with honey the rim 01 the 

cup of medicine which the child must drink, one 

1 IV. 965. 2 II. 730; III. 419. 

3 III. 802; V. 165, 1043. 4 V. 112. 

5 II. 1033. 



70 LUCRETIUS AND EPICUREANISM 

cannot but be astonished at the energy of his con- 
viction. The language of Epicurus is as gentle as 
the life which it inculcates. Epicurus, as well as 
his successors, breathes the calm of Omar Khay- 
yam, the apathy of the East : " It is better to lie 
than to sit, it is better to sit than to stand, it is 
better to be idle than to stretch forth the hands to 
work." But Lucretius is like a physician who, in 
recommending his patient perfect rest, should rush 
at him, shake him, fling him on a bed, and shriek 
at him, " Don't stir ! " Lucretius puts himself into 
a violent heat with his exhortation to us to keep 
ourselves perfectly cool. Well did Statius 1 speak 
of the " towering passion of Lucretius " {furor ar- 
dims Lucreti). His book is indeed " a passionate 
scroll written over with lamentation and woe." 

The third book of the poem stalks through the 
The valley valley of the shadow of death. Its theme 
shadow of * s tne blackness of death {mortis nigror), 
death. from the fear of which he longs to eman- 

cipate man. Like the hapless author of " The City 
of Dreadful Night " he tells his fellow-men that, 
though the Garden of Life be wholly waste, the 
sweet flowers withered, and the fruit-trees barren, 
over its wall hano- ever the rich dark clusters of 

o 

the Vine of Death, within easy reach of the hand, 
which may pluck of them when it will. He prof- 
fers them 

" One anodyne for torture and despair, 

The certitude of Death, which no reprieve 

1 Silvae, II. 7. 



THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO LUCRETIUS 7 1 

Can put off long ; and which, divinely tender, 
But waits the outstretch'd hand to promptly render 
That draught whose slumber nothing can bereave." 

The good tidings of great joy, that there is no life 
beyond the grave, he announces in a The gospel 
spirit of exultation. "The walls of the £ c £Sg 
world part asunder. I see all the inmost tius - 
springs of nature," 1 cries Lucretius, in the rapt 
ecstasy of Rossetti's Blessed Damozel, who leaned 
out over the gold bar of Heaven and saw 

" Time, like a pulse, beat fierce 
Thro' all the worlds." 

The poet looks back in awe on what he has al- 
ready proved, — a world composed by the fortuitous 
concourse of atoms, and utterly dissociated from 
the gods, who luxuriate in an idle beatitude. He 
revels in the thought of death and the grave, 
but he treats with all the scorn of a Hebrew pro- 
phet the carpe diem philosophy which Horace has 
taught us to regard as the natural expression of 
Epicureanism. Other Epicureans pass over the 
topic of death lightly, and bid us not to think of 
it, or to think of it as little as we may. Lucretius 
is enamored of it. There are who have, like the 
sad singer of the saddest and sweetest of odes, been 
" Half in love with easeful Death, 
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme." 

But only one modern poet is the rival of Lucretius 
as a passionate lover of " lovely, soothing, delicate 

1 " Moenia mundi 
Discedunt, totum video per inane geri res." — III. 16. 



72 LUCRETIUS AND EPICUREANISM 

Death." Walt Whitman alone rises to the rapture 
of Lucretius when he cries, 

" Praise, praise, praise, 
For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding Death ! " 

and again, 

" I joyously sing the dead 
Lost in the loving floating ocean, 
Laved in the flood of thy bliss, O Death." 

But it is not always by singing the praises of Death 
that he seeks to emancipate his fellow-men from 
the fear of it. The following verses, in which the 
Lucretius similarity of the theme suggested the 
on death. use f {he metre of Tennyson's " Two 
Voices," show Lucretius in a less exultant mood, 
not crying, " O death, where is thy sting ? O grave, 
where is thy victory ? " not " putting under his 
feet," as Virgil sang, 1 

" All forms of fear, inexorable doom, 
And all the din that rises from Hell's maw," 

but rather whispering, " Comfort ye, comfort ye, 
my people," owning its terrors, but gently consol- 
ing his fellow-sufferers, and proffering them quiet 
counsel : — 

" ' No more shall look upon thy face 

Sweet spouse, no more with emulous race 
Sweet children court their sire's embrace. 

" ' To their soft touch right soon no more 
Thy pulse shall thrill; e'en now is o'er 
Thy stewardship, Death is at the door. 

1 Georg. II. 491. 



LUCRETIUS ON DEATH 73 

" ' One dark day wresteth every prize 
From hapless man in hapless wise, 
Yea, e'en the pleasure of his eyes.' 

" Thus men bewail their piteous lot ; 
Yet should they add, ' 'T is all forgot, 
These things the dead man recketh not.' 

" Yea, could they knit for them this chain 
Of words and reasons, men might gain 
Some dull narcotic for their pain, 

" Saying, 'The dead are dead indeed ; 
The dead, from all heart-sickness freed, 
Sleep and shall sleep and take no heed.' 

" Lo, if dumb Nature found a voice, 
Would she bemoan, and not make choice 
To bid poor mortals to rejoice, 

" Saying, ' Why weep thy wane, O man? 
Wert joyous e'en when life began, 
When thy youth's sprightly freshets ran? 

" ' Nay, all the joys thy life e'er knew 
As poured into a sieve fell through, 
And left thee but to rail and ru/e.' 

" Go, fool, as doth a well-filled guest 
Sated of life: with tranquil breast 
Take thine inheritance of rest. 



" Why seekest joys that soon must pale 
Their feeble fires, and swell the tale 
Of things of nought and no avail ? 



74 LUCRETIUS AND EPICUREANISM 

" Die, sleep ! For all things are the same ; 
Tho' spring now stir thy crescent frame, 
5 T will wither : all things are the same." 

This minor chord of ennui, " all things are the 
same," and the sad, sad word, " in vain " (negtii- 
quam), which so often recur in the midst of his 
fervid and glad evangel, ever and anon intrude as 
uninvited guests at the poet's feast of reason, and 
cast ashes on the train of flowery clauses in which 
he enshrined his honeyed precepts. 

It was his fierce attack on the belief in a future 
Allusions to life which drew down on Lucretius the 
by arfcient implacable enmity of the Christian writ- 
wnters. ers> anc i which whelmed him under a 

conspiracy of silence on the part of his Roman 
contemporaries and successors. Virgil and Horace 
make allusions to him which show that they deeply 
admired him, but they never mention his name. 
Ovid only says that his work will not be forgotten 
(to give the sense of the Ovidian passage in the 
words of Tennyson) till 

" this cosmic order everywhere, 
Shatter'd into one earthquake in one day, 
Cracks all to pieces." 

Cicero, indeed, wrote of him 1 that his work was 
, marked by brilliant flashes of genius, and 

Criticism of J b ' 

Cicero on yet (a rare combination) by excellent art, 
■ — a passage which shows Cicero's perfect 
literary judgment, but which his editors have for 
i Q. Fr.ll. 9 (ii), 3. 



TALES ABOUT LUCRETIUS' LIFE 7$ 

the most part perverted by inserting a non, and 
making Cicero thus deny either artistic finish or 
brilliancy of genius to his illustrious contempo- 
rary. The other writers and thinkers of Rome 
have regarded the poem (to use the image of Con- 
stant Martha) as some triste bidental, — some 
spot blasted with lightning. As the ancient Ro- 
mans fenced off the place which Jove had smitten 
with his thunderbolt, lest some unwary footstep 
should trespass on a region accursed of God, so 
they kept aloof and closed their ears to the sombre 
strain which breathed the stern note of defiance of 
death. The statement of Jerome that Tales about 
Lucretius was maddened by a love-philter his life - 
and perished by his own hand, and the other record 
that he died on the day when Virgil assumed the 
toga of manhood, are myths of the kind so fre- 
quent in the ancient world, and have no weight 
save in so far as they suggest the wrath of the gods 
which ought to have pursued the author of the 
poem on the "Constitution of Nature," and mark 
the fact that Lucretius was, as it were, the literary 
godfather of the poet who wrote the " Georgics." 

We must call to mind certain points of view 
which greatly mitigate the audacity of the Lucre- 
tian assault on the doctrine of a future Doctrine of 
life. This belief was not firmly held J^tureiife 
even by the most orthodox thinkers of cient world. 
his time. Cicero acknowledges that the letter 1 
which Sulpicius sent him on the occasion of his 
1 Fam. IV. s. 



76 LUCRETIUS AND EPICUREANISM 

daughter Tullia's death embraced every source of 
consolation which the case admitted ; yet there is 
no allusion in that letter to the comfort which would 
have been afforded by the belief in the happiness 
of Tullia in another state. "If," writes Sulpicius 
— a sad "if." — "if the dead have any conscious- 
ness, the girl will be grieved to think that you 
persevere in obstinate grief." In a letter written 
a few months after to Torquatus, 1 Cicero speaks 
of death, if it should befall him in that troublous 
time, as being after all only annihilation {sine ullo 
sensu). Even Seneca, long after the time of Lu- 
cretius, calls the immortality of the soul a beauti- 
ful dream (be Hum somnium), and describes its ad- 
herents as asserting rather than proving a most 
acceptable doctrine. 2 The traditional pictures of 
the future abodes of the blest and the damned 
were universally discredited. Future life, even 
when regarded as possible, was the object, not of 
hope, but of fear. At best it was a sphere of ennui 
and inaction. The open rebels against Zeus had 
at least the dignity of suffering, but the rank and 
file of the dead languished in a world which was 
but a pale shadow of this, — a world without hope 
or aim, a " land of darkness as darkness itself, and 
of the shadow of death, without any order, and 
where the light is as darkness." Even the heroic 
Achilles 3 sees nothing comfortable in a future 
life : " Rather would I live upon the soil as the 
hireling of another, with a landless man that had 
1 Fam. VI. 4. 2 Ep. 102. 3 Odyssey XI. 488. 



THE "ANTI-LUCRETIUS" IN LUCRETIUS 77 

no great livelihood, than bear sway among all the 
dead that are gone." Such was the pale realm 
whose walls Lucretius battered with such fierce 
exultation, — walls to which no trembling hopes 
looked up as to an abiding city, or a treasure house 
where rust and moth corrupt not, and where thieves 
cannot break through and steal. 

A brilliant French critic, M. Patin, has used a 
striking phrase about the poet of Epi- u 

cureanism. He says there is in Lucre- Lucretius" 

. . . in Lucretius. 

tius an anti-Lucretius which is forever 
pulling him back from the extreme consequences 
of his theory, and forcing him into conclusions 
more in accordance with his ardent and enthusi- 
astic temperament. It will be opportune here to 
glance at some of the manifestations of the anti- 
Lucretius in Lucretius. As Lucretius deprives the 
gods of all influence over Nature, he is obliged to 
account for the existence of Nature by the postu- 
late of a fortuitous concourse of atoms. But here 
we are surprised to meet with expressions quite 
inconsistent with this cold materialism. What have 
principles, conditions, laws (ratioites,foedera, leges), 
to do with the freaks of blind Chance ? How can 
Nature be called creatrix or gubernans, "creative " 
or "regulative," 1 if she is bound fast in the fetters 
of Fate ? We have even Fortuna gubernans in I. 
1 08. What is this but a Dcus (or Dea) ex machina 
who brings about the denouement of a drama which 
else would have had a lame and impotent conclu- 
sion indeed ? 

1 I. 680, v. 78. 



78 LUCRETIUS AND EPICUREANISM 

In VI. 640 he ascribes to Nature those volcanic 
convulsions which he elsewhere expressly disso- 
ciates from divine influence. And what but divine 
influence is the hidden power (vis abditd) of which 
he says x that it " constantly tramples on human 
grandeur, and is seen to tread under its heel the 
insignia of human power, and make sport for itself 
of them " ? 

Nature, presented by Lucretius as a mother in 
II. 990, again appears as a cruel stepmother in V. 
778, where she is described as casting the newly 
born infant, naked and weeping, on the inhospitable 
shore of life, more helpless than the brutes, and 
more able to feel and deplore its helplessness ; 
then fostering the growth of tares and all noxious 
weeds, and trying to wrest from wretched man the 
scanty portion of the earth which she has granted 
him wherefrom to extract a meagre sustenance 
with the sweat of his brow. Everywhere Nature 
has the attributes of will and personality. Again, 
he subtilizes the soul, the soul of the soul, up to 
the very verge of spirituality. It is from his vivid 
and beautiful illustrations of the interdependence 
of body and soul that Virgil has taken two fine 
passages, — that in which Dido " sought the light 
of heaven and groaned when she found it," 2 and 
that in which the fingers of the dying man twitch 
with the longing to grasp the hilt of the sword 
again. 3 

Above all, in the clinamen of the atoms, or the 
1 V. 1230. 2 IV. 688. 3 X. 396. 



LANGUAGE OF LUCRETIUS RELIGIOUS 79 

causeless deviation of the atom-stream from the 
right line, we have an active, intelligent principle 
thrusting itself in spite of his materialism into his 
system. In the words of De Musset, — 

" Despite ourselves to Heaven we raise our eyes." 
(" Malgre nous vers le ciel il faut tourner les yeux.") 

He is not a fatalist. He recognizes a nameless 
force (vis nominis expers) which he finely calls " an 
influence torn from the grasp of Necessity " (fatis 
avolsa voluntas), and which is not unlike Matthew 
Arnold's postulate of a " tendency that makes for 
righteousness." 

The very language of Lucretius is tinged with a 
deep religious fervor which reminds us 

Language of 

of Milton. We recall the " hideous hum " Lucretius 
of the oracles when we read of " the awful re lgl ° 
state " in which the image of the divine mother of 
the gods is carried through the lands, and how she 
" mutely enriches mortals with a blessing not ex- 
pressed in words." 1 Indeed, if the philosophy of 
Lucretius can be described as a poisonous plant at 
all, it is at least one of those venomous flowers 
which supply healing influences, too. There is 
nothing in his system of morality which can shock 
us except some of his theories with regard to the 
passion of love, and in extenuation of them we 
must remember how coarsely the spirit of the time 
regarded womanhood. Moreover, we can hardly be 
wrong in seeing in the poet himself evidences of 
1 II. 6io, 624. 



80 LUCRETIUS AND EPICUREANISM 

some physical defect or mental craze animating him 
with a furious hatred of the passion itself. His 
master Epicurus looked on it but as a disturbing 
influence. Lucretius assailed it as a bane and a 
curse. Not his the "tears that love can die ; " his 
rather to heap " shards, flints, and pebbles " on the 
grave of love. He has a delight like 

Lucretius b . . to 

compared that of Dean Swift m showing the seamy 
side of the passion, and indeed in this 
respect strongly reminds us of the great Irishman 
whose bones moulder in St. Patrick's Cathedral in 
Dublin, whose heart, in the desperate words of his 
epitaph, " cruel indignation now no longer rends." * 
" What a vulture," writes Thackeray, " it was that 
tore the heart of that giant ! " 2 

1 " Ubi saeva indignatio cor non lacerat." 

2 The following passages from Thackeray's admirable 
Lectures on the English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century 
will suggest to readers of Lucretius that the comparison with 
Swift is not merely fanciful : " As is the case with madmen, 
certain subjects provoke him, and awaken his fits of wrath. 
Marriage is one of these ; in a hundred passages in his writ- 
ings he rages against it, — rages against children." 

Again: "And it was not merely by the sarcastic method 
that Swift exposed the unreasonableness of loving and hav- 
ing children. ... In fact our great satirist was of opinion 
that conjugal love was unadvisable, and illustrated the 
theory by his own practice and example, — God help him ! — 
which made him about the most wretched being in God's 
world. ' My health is somewhat mended,' he writes in 
May, 1 719, 'but at best I have an ill head and an aching 
heart.' " 

In another trait Swift resembled the Latin poet: "Swift 



1 



ORIGINALITY OF LUCRETIUS 8 1 

The true charge against Epicureanism is not 
that it debases morality, or 

" makes divine Philosophy- 
Procuress to the lords of Hell," 

but that it tends to extinguish energy by enfee- 
bling the springs of action. According to it, pas- 
sion and action are alike folly ; there is no virtue 
but egotism ; the true wisdom is apathy, originality 
The extraordinary originality of Lucre- ofLu cretius. 
tius is shown in the strenuous spirit which he 
breathes into this flaccid and lymphatic creed. 
We seem to see a St. Anthony fiercely fighting 
the passions that fiercely tear him, — a St. Simeon 
Stylites who has not succeeded in quenching his 
ambition, but only in giving it another object, pas- 
sionate in the vaunting of his victory over himself, 
and leaping with all the ardor of a young lover into 
the arms of his " passionless bride, divine Tran- 
quillity." 

It may seem strange that Lucretius should have 
chosen verse as the vehicle of his teach- vehicle of 
ing, especially as Epicurus wrote in prose hls teachin s- 
and condemned poetry on principle. However, he 
had the precedent of Xenophanes and Empedocles, 
and among his own countrymen that of Ennius, who 

was a reverent, was a pious spirit. . . . Through the storms 
and tempests of his furious mind the stars of religion and 
love break out in the blue, shining serenely, though hidden 
by the driving clouds and the maddened hurricane of his 
life." 



82 LUCRETIUS AND EPICUREANISM 

translated Epicharmus. He tells us that his design 
was "to make a harsh truth less bitter." Do we 
not find in our own time the novel forced into 
the service of some particular school of religious 
thought ; and do we not meet even certain purists 
who condemn novel-reading as a practice, but make 
an exception in favor of such works of fiction as 
embellish and promote those particular church prin- 
ciples which they themselves affect ? 

In the poem of Lucretius, beside certain amus- 
ingly naif and (one might almost say) 

Childish ., . _ . 

speculations puerile speculations, we find real contri- 
e poem. kutions to k now i e dge, which science now 
accepts, and which were truly remarkable discover- 
ies in the time of Lucretius. Among the most 
crude is his theory of the causes of sleep, in the 
fourth book (910 sqq.), to which he carefully be- 
speaks the attention of his readers in some very 
fine verses. According to him, " sleep mainly takes 
place when the force of the soul has been scat- 
tered about through the frame, and in part has been 
forced abroad and taken its departure, in part also 
has been thrust back and has withdrawn into the 
depths of the body ; after that the limbs are re- 
laxed and droop. For there is no doubt that this 
sense exists in us by the agency of the soul ; and 
when sleep obstructs the action of this sense, then 
we must assume that our soul has been disordered 
and forced abroad : not indeed all, for then the 
body would be steeped in the everlasting chill of 
death. If no part of the soul remained behind 



EPICUREANISM THOROUGH-GOING 83 

concealed in the limbs, as fire remains concealed 
when buried under much ash, whence could sense 
be suddenly rekindled through the limbs, as flame 
can spring up from hidden fire ? " 

Another passage of amusing naivete is his way 
of accounting for the terror manifested by the 
lion in the presence of the cock. 1 " Moreover, 
ravenous lions cannot bear to face and gaze upon a 
cock with flapping wings putting night to rout, and 
summoning the morn with shrill voice. In such 
wise the lions at once bethink them of flight, 
because sure enough in the body of cocks are cer- 
tain seeds, and these, when they have been dis- 
charged into the eyes of lions, bore into the pupils 
and cause such sharp pain that, fierce though they 
be, they cannot continue to face them." We are 
reminded of the attempts of the Royal Institution 
in the time of Charles II. to account for a non- 
existent phenomenon. The theories explaining 
the greater weight of a dead than a living fish 
were not less far-fetched and fanciful than the 
hypothesis of Lucretius to account for the imagi- 
nary tremors of the king of beasts. 

Epicurus is contented with any explanation, pro- 
vided that it does not postulate divine or Epicurean- 
spiritual agency. In fact he often gives *"£*££ 
his reader two incompatible theories, and belief - 
bids him take whichever he pleases. A good Epi- 
curean does not hesitate in his choice between 
science and his system. Polyaenus, on his conver- 
1 IV. 706. 



84 LUCRETIUS AND EPICUREANISM 

sion to Epicureanism, declared his conviction that 
there was no such thing as geometrical proof. 
Catholicism was once as thorough-going. I have 
myself seen an old edition of the " Principia," by 
a learned abbe, who took care to explain in his 
preface that, though the conclusions of Newton 
constituted a good discipline for the exercise of 
the mental faculties, and therefore might be stud- 
ied with profit, yet they must not be regarded as 
true, inasmuch as a Bull of the Holy Father had 
spoken of the sun as revolving round the earth ! 
In a similar spirit Lucretius, after setting forth 1 a 
theory of the antipodes with amazing scientific ac- 
Reiationof curacy, rejects it as "a fond thing vainly 
theories C to invented " (vanus error). The same the- 
religion. 0I y was afterwards repudiated by the 
Christian church. It is remarkable, as M. Con- 
stant Martha has well observed, how speculative 
beliefs sometimes, so to speak, change sides. 
Here we have Epicureanism and early Chris- 
tianity ranged hand in hand against history and 
science. So, again, Lucretius believes in a final 
destruction of the world, while the religious of his 
time held that it would be eternal. It is now the 
orthodox who maintain the Lucretian view, and 
the free-thinkers who take the other side. These 
considerations should teach us that we ought not 
either to embrace a scientific theory because we 
think we recognize in it an ally to religion, or to 
reject it as a suspected foe. Ajax tells us in a 

1 I. 1053. 



ANTICIPATIONS OF MODERN SCIENCE 85 

pathetic passage of the play of Sophocles, how a sad 
experience has taught him that we should look on 
our friends as those who may one day be our ene- 
mies, and on our enemies as those whom time may 
yet draw to our hearts. Such ought to be the 
attitude of the true friend of religion towards 
scientific theories. He should consider only their 
absolute worth. About their relation to religion 
he may be mistaken, or the friend of yesterday may 
be the foe of to-morrow. 

To set against the absurd speculations which we 
have been considering, it will be inter- . . . 

° 7 Anticipa- 

esting to point to places in which Lu- tions of 

. , . i t „ modern 

cretius or his predecessors have really science in 
anticipated modern scientific research : 

Lucretius recognizes that in a vacuum every body, 
no matter what its weight, falls with equal swift- 
ness ; 1 that the atmosphere is material; 2 that in 
youth the repair of the tissues is greater than the 
waste, the contrary being the case in old age ; 3 
the circulation of the sap in the vegetable world is 
known to Lucretius ; 4 and he describes falling 
stars, aerolites, etc., as the unused material of the 
universe. 5 But, far above and beyond these par- 
ticular anticipations of modern thought, we have in 
the whole atomistic theory what is now the basis 
of the molecular hypothesis, which latter only adds 
the existence of chemical as well as mechanical 
changes among the atoms, but leaves the general 

1 II. 237. 2 I. 27. 3 II. 1122. 

4 I. 347. 5 n. 547. 



86 LUCRETIUS AND EPICUREANISM 

conception the same. Snow and fire, according 
to Lucretius, come from different combinations 
of the same atoms, just as a tragedy and com- 
edy are made of the same letters differently dis- 
posed. 1 Finally, the Darwinian natural selec- 
tion, struggle for existence, and survival of the 
fittest are distinctly adumbrated, in Book V. 873 : 
" They doubtless became the prey of others, unable 
to break through the bonds of fate by which they 
were confined until Nature caused that species to 
disappear." 2 

It is, indeed, food for deep reflection when we 
intense observe the intense interest and confi- 

Lucretiufin dence which this mighty intelligence 
his work. feels in the childish physical theory 
which he has embraced. It is to him a source of 
ever new and ever present delight. The pool of 
water in the street fills him with wonder and awe. 
It is but a few inches deep, yet to the eye its pro- 
fundity is that of the reflected heavens. Like this 
is the mind of Lucretius himself. The most trivial 
things become invested with a sombre sublimity, 
an august bigness, as soon as they begin to reflect 
his majestic spirit. 

Decidedly the most remarkable feature in the 
whole poem is the solemn beauty of 

Beauty of . r J 

imagery and imagery and language into which he 
bursts in unfolding his thorny specula- 
tions. Examples of this are abundant, and an 
excellent instance is the passage so exquisitely 
1 I. 824. 2 V. 875-877. 



BEAUTY OF IMAGERY AND DICTION 87 

reproduced in Tennyson's " Lucretius," where he 
celebrates — 

" The all-generating powers and genial heat 
Of Nature when she strikes through the thick blood 
Of cattle, and light is large, and lambs are glad 
Nosing the mother's udder, and the bird 
Makes his heart voice amid the blaze of flowers." 

I know of no other poem except Tennyson's 
"Two Voices" in which the same wealth of poesy 
is enlisted to explain and beautify abstruse argu- 
ment. Nearly every verse of the " Two Voices " 
illustrates this exquisite marriage of poetry and 
logic. This passage will serve as an example as 
well as another : — 

" Again the voice spake unto me : 
' Thou art so steeped in misery, 
Surely were better not to be. 

" * Thine anguish will not let thee sleep, 
Nor any train of reason keep : 
Thou canst not think, but thou wilt weep.' 

" I said : ' The years with change advance ; 
If I make dark my countenance, 
I shut my life from happier chance. 

" ' Some turn this sickness yet might take, 
Ev'n yet.' But he : ' What drug can make 
A wither'd palsy cease to shake ? ' 

" I wept : ' Tho' I should die, I know 
That all about the thorn will blow 
In tufts of many-tinted snow ; 



88 LUCRETIUS AND EPICUREANISM 

" ' And men, through novel spheres of thought, 
Still moving after truth long sought, 
Will learn new things when I am not.' 

" ' Yet,' said the secret voice, ' some time, 
Sooner or later, will gray prime 
Make thy grass hoar with early rime. 

" ' Not less swift souls that yearn for light, 
Rapt after heaven's starry flight, 
Will sweep the tracts of day and night. 

" ' Not less the bee will range her cells, 
The furzy prickle fire the dells, 
The foxglove cluster dappled bells.' " 

We may observe a very similar faculty in the 
Latin poet in many places, for instance in II. 576— 
580 : "With death there is ever blending the wail 
of infants newly born into the light ; and no night 
has ever followed day, no morn ever dawned on 
night, but hath heard the mingled sounds of feeble 
infant wailings and of the lamentations that follow 
the dead and the black funeral train." The whole 
thought is but a step in his ratiocination, but it 
insensibly clothes itself in images, and brings pic- 
tures before our eyes. And we see the born word- 
painter in such expressions as " the wiles and force 
and craft of the faithless sea, the treacherous, allur- 
ing smile of the calm ocean;" 1 "the shells that, 
paint the lap of Earth;" 2 "and now, shaking his 
head [a fine touch], the aged peasant laments that 
the toil of his hands has come to nought ; " 3 " then 
1 11.555. 2 H. 374. 8 II. n64 r 



PLACE OF LUCRETIUS AMONG POETS 89 

all these vapors gather together above, and, taking 
shape as clouds, on high weave a canopy beneath 
the firmament." 1 

Lucretius has now won his place among the great 
poets of the world. He has survived the „, 

r Place of 

anathemas of pious zealots and the plau- Lucretius 

r 1 • rnr-i iii-r among the 

dits of the enemies 01 all faith and belief, poets of the 
We now see how religious is the irreligion 
of this Titan. We hear in his sombre strains not 
the sneers of the encyclopaedist, but the high words 
of Prometheus on the Caucasus. At last the world 
has learned that intrepid audacity combined with 
noble sincerity may have a beauty which is like the 
beauty of holiness. At last Lucretius — 

" Lifts 
His golden feet on those empurpled stairs 
That climb into the windy halls of heaven." 

We see in him a sage who dwells on the lofty 
vantage-ground of science, and from his philosophic 
observatory looks down with disdain on the petty 
interests of the world. But he looks down on 
the world with a godly joy {divina voluptas) and 
a holy awe {horror). And we see in him an eager 
student of Nature, who has been raised by a natu- 
rally religious cast of mind, through cold and in- 
tangible abstractions to which he tried in vain to 
cling, — raised out of Nature and up to Nature's 
God. 

1 V. 466. 



IV. 



CATULLUS AND THE TRANSITION TO THE AUGUS- 
TAN AGE. 

Passing from the ghosts that haunt the early 
prime of Latin literature and, in fragments which 
often the merest chance has preserved for us, 
" come like shadows, so depart," we have reached 
a firm land, with living and breathing poets, a land 
that echoes to the cries of two great spirits, Lucre- 
tius and Catullus, the one tormented by the pain- 
ful riddle of the earth, the other by the pangs of 
disprized love. We have seen Lucretius 

Lucretius 

and Catullus in his austere, almost religious, seclusion, 

contrasted. . ,. , 

hardly glancing at any passing event, 
looking down with the pity and disdain of an 
anchorite on the struggles of fashion and ambi- 
tion, and scowling with the fierce indignation of 
a Swift on the joys and pangs of love. In him 
the man was nothing, the philosopher was every- 
thing. In Catullus we meet one for whom philoso- 
phy was nothing, and the keynote of whose song is 
man and man's heart. Catullus had studied Greek 
sympathetically and well, but it was only for liter- 
ary purposes. The Greek philosophy which was so 
attractive to his contemporaries, especially Cicero, 
was to him only words " and the chatter of solemn 
graybeards." : A lecture on Lucretius pursues the 
1 " Rumoresque senum severiorum." — V. 2. 



THE HISTORY OF A HEART 91 

history of the poet's mind ; a lecture on Catullus 
pursues the history of his heart. 

It is, perhaps, easy to exaggerate the importance, 
as an influence on a man's life, of that The poem 
train of emotional experiences which we tL C mstory 
call love ; but in the case of Catullus it of his heart 
was all-powerful, — his love was his life. Since 
this is so, and since the history of the poet's 
heart has been set forth by himself in that mar- 
velous series of poems tracing his infatuation for 
Lesbia from its rapturous beginning to its early 
estrangement ; thence to that reconciliation which 
shows something of the sweetness of lovers' quar- 
rels composed, but more of the bitterness of re- 
membering happier things ; and finally to the furi- 
ous scorn with which the lover " tears his passion 
from his bosom, though his heart be at the root," — 
is it not marvelous that not a single editor, down 
to Mr. Postgate, whose recent and scholarly edition 
has done so much for the text of Catullus, should 
have given us the poems in the order in which they 
must have been written ? Yet such is the case. 
Editors continue to present us in the eleventh 
ode with the final repudiation of Lesbia, while we 
have in the fifty-first the rapture of reciprocated 
love, in the sixty-eighth the first beginnings of 
suspicion, in the seventy-sixth settled despair, 
in the eighth the vain effort to forget and passion- 
ate longing for the past which can never come 
again, and in the eighty-third hopeful auguries 
drawn from the unfriendly demeanor of Lesbia 



92 CATULLUS AND THE TRANSITION 

toward her lover in the presence of her husband. 
The principle on which the poems are arranged in 
their present order is so utterly illogical and un- 
chronological that it has been surmised — and, we 
could well believe, with justice — that the juxtaposi- 
tion of poems written at widely different times, and 
under widely different influences, may have arisen 
from a merely mechanical principle of arrange- 
ment which bade the first copyists choose in each 
case such poems as would just fill up the page on 
which they were engaged, and not run over into 
the next. I will endeavor to rectify this error, and 
place beside each other in their right order a few 
of the poems in which Catullus has struck those 
terrible chords which have given us the very vibra- 
tions of his heart, — chords as true as those of 
Burns or Shakespeare, and as artistic as those 
of Keats or Shelley. 

Catullus was a contemporary of Cicero, Lucretius, 
Position and C. Julius Caesar, and died most 
st n anc1s C of m " Probably in 54 b. c. at the age of thirty. 
Catullus. All his poetry was written in the last six 
years of his short life, between his twenty-fourth 
and his thirtieth year. He had Celtic blood in his 
veins, coming from Verona in Cisalpine Gaul, 
which was then indeed meet nurse of poetic chil- 
dren, and was about to give to Rome Virgil and 
Cornelius Gallus, as well as the writer of what is 
perhaps the most perfect prose style ever achieved, 
the historian Livy. His intimates were all the 
most distinguished men which the time and the 



CIRCUMSTANCES OF CATULLUS 93 

town produced, — the Metelli, Hortensius, Man- 
lius Torquatus, Memmius, the two Ciceros. The 
great orator, whom he salutes as — 

" Most eloquent of all the line 
From Romulus who claim," x 

never actually mentions the name of Catullus, but 
the orator has undoubtedly borrowed from the 
poet two happy expressions which we meet in his 
correspondence : once when he says that a public 
man should be " more sensitive than the tip of the 
ear ; " 2 and again, when he echoes in "ocellos Ita- 
liae villulas " 3 the charming apostrophe to Sirmio 
in the thirty-first ode : — 

" Thou of all isles and all peninsulas 
The very eye." 

The family of Catullus was old and high, though 
no member of it had attained that official rank 
which was the condition of nobility technically so 
called. Though he often sportively alludes to his 

1 Carm. XLIX. Here and in some other places I use the 
often excellent but somewhat unequal translation of Sir The- 
odore Martin, sometimes venturing to remodel his version a 
little with the view of bringing out some point on which one 
may wish specially to dwell, but which naturally is not so 
prominent in his rendering. In some places where I could 
not take quite his view of the tone of the poem, as in VIII, 
beginning " Miser Catulle desinas ineptire," and in a few 
other shorter pieces, I have essayed a translation of my own. 

2 " Auricula infima molliorem " (Q. Fr. II. 13, 4) ; cp. " mol- 
lior imula auricilla " (Catull. XXV. 2). 

3 Att. XVI. 6, 2. 



94 CATULLUS AND THE TRANSITION 

want of money, as when he tells one friend that his 
"purse is full of cobwebs," 1 and another that his 
house is exposed to the worst draught he knows, 
namely, a draft of fifteen thousand two hundred 
sesterces' morgage on it, 2 yet he cannot have been 
what we should call poorly provided for. We know 
that he had two country-houses, one near Tivoli 
and another on the Lago di Garda, to which he 
often retired, and which he describes as delightful 
retreats ; moreover, he could afford to keep a pri- 
vate yacht large enough to carry him from Bithy- 
nia to Italy. His intimates and associates in Rome 
were the highest in rank, birth, and distinction. 

The woman to whose fascinations and falseness 
„, ,. , we owe much of what is best in the 

Clodia, the 

Lesbia of poetry of Catullus, the belle dame sans 
merci who first made him a poet and 
then a corpse, was, as is now generally admitted, 
Clodia, the sister of Cicero's enemy, wife of the 
great noble the Consul Metellus, and consequently 
about the grandest lady in the world. Rich, highly 
cultivated, witty, very beautiful, and conscious of 
the " aspiring blood " of the Claudii in her veins, 
the Palatine Medea, as she was called, seems to 
have had for the Roman youth of her time an ab- 
solutely irresistible attraction. When she turned 
the head of Catullus, a brilliant youth of two- 
and-twenty, she was herself past thirty years of 
age, with her ruinous charms in the full luxuri- 

1 " Plenus sacculus est aranearum." — XIII. 8. 

2 Carm. XXVI. 



CLODIA, THE LESBIA OF CATULLUS 95 

ance of their poisonous bloom. For her beauty- 
was of that Junoesque type which even in South- 
ern Italy requires time to enable it to expand to 
its full flower. Known to us as she is only from 
the railings of her bitter enemies, perhaps the three 
greatest masters of the art of invective that ever 
wrote, — Cicero, Caelius, and Catullus, — she ap- 
pears, indeed, as a monster of almost incredible pro- 
fligacy, but also as a great and well-marked person- 
ality in her generation. We must of course make 
allowance for the manners of a time when no limits 
whatever were set to the license of abuse, — a time 
when no one thought it indecorous in Cicero to 
apply such terms as "swine," " ordure," " carrion," 
to his political opponents in the Senate, and when 
such was the standard of manners in that " assem- 
bly of kings " that Cicero, in a letter to his brother, 1 
relates as an every-day incident how rival orators 
spat in each other's faces ; a time when, if a mag- 
istrate wanted to address the people, he was obliged 
to carry the Rostra by assault, and to maintain his 
occupancy at the risk of his life. It is true that in 
the period of Catullus we begin to see the rise of 
something which we should now call society, the 
dawn of the beau monde. But the society of which 
we catch glimpses in the poems of Catullus and the 
letters of Cicero is still very rudimentary. Catullus 
thinks it a good joke to accuse a guest of stealing 
the napkins ; and the comparatively refined Cicero 
banters Atticus about the poorness of the fare 
i Q. Fr. II. 3, 2. 



96 CATULLUS AND THE TRANSITION 

which he serves up on such expensive plate of the 
fern-pattern, and wonders what it would be if 
the service were earthenware. 1 In such an age it is 
not surprising that the license of personal invective 
should be really unlimited. Furious and now un- 
utterable charges were publicly made against every 
public man by his opponents, and against private 
enemies by the man who could win the ear of the 
public. The assertions of Cicero and Catullus, that 
Clodia reached the last and most public stage in 
the career of infamy, we need not believe, any 
more than we believe that Caesar was addicted 
to every unspeakable vice. To impute such crimes 
was the fashion of the time. Different ages do 
not understand each other. 2 But we have good 
grounds for looking on Clodia as being a woman 
of daemonic fascination and cruelty, and a great 
social force in Rome at a time when society was 
beginning to form itself in a city to which for 
centuries the home-keeping aristocracy had failed 
to give the semblance of a social centre and seat 
of fashion and gaiety. When we think of Clo- 
dia with her large, burning eyes, now overflowing 

1 " Sed heus tu ! Quid cogitas? in felicatis lancibus et 
splendidissimis canistris, olusculis nos soles pascere : quid te 
in vasis fictilibus appositurum putem ? " — Att. VI. I, 13. 

2 Expressions in constant use by the Puritans and Cove- 
nanters would now afford a presumption of imbecility, or at 
least gross insincerity. Therefore the Puritans are often 
spoken of as hypocrites and fools. But they were nothing 
of the kind, only subsequent ages did not understand their 
modes of expressing themselves. 



CLODIA, THE LESBIA OF CATULLUS 97 

with tears over the death of her sparrow, now flash- 
ing with malicious joy as she and her boy lover, in 
fulfilment of a sportive vow, commit to the flames, 
with expressions certainly not too weak, the feeble 
work of a rival literary aspirant, the Annals of 
Tanusius, whom Catullus after his fashion pillories 
under the metrically equivalent name of Volusius, 1 
we feel that we are in the presence of a very wo- 
man, who had also many of the qualities which in 
Bohemian life knit man to man. Her sensuous 
exuberance of form is conveyed to us by many a 
dexterous touch : — 

" Therein my lustrous goddess with soft step 
Enter'd, and 'neath her glistering foot the sandal 
Creak'd as she trod." 2 

Here is no "airy, fairy Lilian," no Titania, no 
poet's unsubstantial dream, but a ripe and real wo- 
man of warm flesh and blood, such as Rubens 
painted. Though Clodia was woman enough to 
weep over her dead sparrow till her lovely eyes 
were red and swollen, she had enough of the man 
in her to take a deep interest in politics. It is 
surely more than a coincidence that the liaison 

1 " Annales Volusi, cacata charta, 
Votum solvite pro mea puella . . . 
At vos interea venite in ignem, 
Pleni ruris et inficetiarum, 

Annales Volusi cacata charta." — Carm. XXXVI. 
2 " Quo mea se molli Candida diva pede 

Intulit, et trito fulgentem in limine plantam 

Innixa, arguta constitit in solea." — LXVIII. 70-72. 



98 CATULLUS AND THE TRANSITLON 

between her and Catullus was uninterrupted until 
the conservatives — to whom belonged Catullus, 
like Cicero, Hortensius, Lucretius, Nepos, Varro, 
and others highly distinguished in literature and 
oratory — felt forced to break with Caesar and the 
democratic party. In the year 62, when Catullus 
came to Rome from his native Verona, Cicero was 
still on friendly terms with Clodius. That feeling 
was soon turned to one of bitter hostility ; but for 
a considerable time after this Cicero endeavored to 
maintain amicable relations with the revolutionists, 
and he succeeded in doing so until the establish- 
ment of the first Triumvirate. 

This was just the time when Clodia began to 
cast off Catullus. Her husband the Consul was 
now dead, poisoned (said common report) by the 
hand of his wife, and the latest victim of her deadly 
m. Caeiius kisses was M. Caelius Rufus, the friend 
Rufus. an( j correspondent of Cicero. He was a 

brilliant young man, especially famed for the witty 
and satirical character of his oratory. Cicero 
writes to him : " In the whole course of my life I 
have never found any one more an fait 'in politics," x 
and he was on the democratic side. He was tall 
and handsome, with a keen wit, and one of the 
best dancers of the day, an accomplishment which 
gave him a start in the race for the favor of Clodia, 
who was herself passionately fond of dancing. 
This was the Rufus whom Catullus calls — 

1 " YloXiTiKwrepov te adhuc neminem cognovi." — Fam. II. 
8, 1. 



M. CAELIUS RUFUS 99 

" The heart in which my friendship found repose, 
The viper that has crept into my life," 

and whom he apostrophizes as 

" Trusted by me not wisely, but too well. 
Not wisely ! Nay, to my own dire defeat." 1 

Caelius was Clodia's lover for two years. Per- 
haps his sharp tongue cost him her favor. Quin- 
tilian tells us that he gave her a very coarse nick- 
name which clung to her, 2 but this was probably 
after he had received his dismissal. Luckily for 
him, he had not the deep sensibilities of Catullus, 
and he seems to have met his private and public 
vicissitudes with the same airy banter and bonhomie 
which makes his correspondence with Cicero so 
fresh and piquant. But the Palatine Medea could 
not be flouted with impunity. A boy of seven- 
teen, no doubt another victim of Clodia's, was put 
up to bring against Caelius serious and groundless 
charges of battery, poisoning, attempted murder, 
and what not. This brought forth the celebrated 
speech of Cicero for Caelius, in which he paints 
the whole life of Clodia as one of unexampled pro- 
fligacy, and represents Caelius as an industrious 
student who for a moment fell under her perni- 

1 " Rufe, mini frustra ac nequiquam credite amico 

(Frustra ! immo magno cum pretio atque malo), 
Sicine subrepsti mi, atque intestina perurens 

Ei misero abripuisti omnia nostra bona ? 
Eripuisti eheu nostrae crudele venenum 

Vitae, eheu nostrae pectus amicitiae." — LXXVII. 

2 Quadrantaria, VIII. 6, 53. 



100 CATULLUS AND THE TRANSITION 

cious influence, and in which he calls up the great 
censor Appius Claudius Caecus from the dead to 
bear witness against his degenerate descendant. 
"He is blind," cries the orator with scathing in- 
vective, " so he will not have the pain of looking 
on such a creature." " Did I make the Appian 
Way, he will ask you, that you might career along 
it with the husbands whom you have seduced from 
their wives ? " Then follows much in this tone 
which would be impossible now in any court ; 
then it was quite parliamentary, and it procured 
the acquittal of Caelius. 

But we have nothing to do with Caelius except 
as the successor and supplanter of Catullus, nor 
even with Clodia except in so far as she affected 
the destiny of Catullus, 

" Making a poet out of a man," 

like the great god Pan in Mrs. Browning's poem. 
Let us take a few characteristic utterances of the 
young lover-poet, illustrating his feelings at each 
stage of his ruinous passion. 

It is ushered in with notes of joy as rapturous as 
a skylark's, and of love as tender as the 

Poems lllus- J ' 

tratingthe cooing of a dove. Words cannot say 

growth of . 1 . 

the passion nor figures count the number ot kisses 
that would be enough, and when count- 
less kisses have been given, the telltale record 
must be rubbed out. With what ? With as many 
more kisses to cover the first. 1 Surely this is, 
1 Carm. V 



THE GROWTH OF HIS PASSION 101 

in the words of Polonius, "the very ecstasy of 
love ; " and we have beside it the utter tender- 
ness of the poems on the dead sparrow, and the 
transport of love which inspires the imitation of 
Sappho. 1 The glow of his passion dazzles us until 
a relation which must even then have been re- 
garded as vicious assumes the guise of innocence. 
The white heat imparts a look of purity. We 
do not feel as much shocked as we ought to 
be when he compares his Lesbia to so pure and 
noble a heroine as Laodamia. And when he glo- 
rifies his friend Allius for a service so base as 
that of providing at his house a place where the 
guilty lovers may meet, we can only wonder at his 
unlimited powers of self-acquittal, — a trait which 
cannot but recall to us another poet with many 
points of similarity to Catullus, the bright spirit of 
Shelley, that " beautiful and ineffectual angel, ever 
beating in the void his luminous wings in vain." 
The unconcealed and unaffected joy and pride of 
Catullus, when he tells in a passage already quoted 
how Lesbia came to him to the house of Allius 
from the very arms of her husband, the proud pa- 
trician consul Metellus, stand without a parallel 
for naif unconsciousness of the existence of a 
moral law, until we read the letter in which 
Shelley sends a polite invitation to the wife whom 
he has just abandoned to come and share with him 
and her rival the delights of a tour in Switzerland. 
And Shelley thought himself an enthusiastic lover 
1 Cann. LI. 



102 CATULLUS AND THE TRANSITION 

of the Good, and took much trouble to show his 
friends how beautiful Virtue was. With the same 
apparently unconscious innocence Catullus tells us 
how he exulted as he heard the threshold creak 
under the sandal of his lustrous goddess. But 
soon a dark and menacing cloud falls over the 
surface of this well of love, so deep and apparently 
so clear. Catullus hears from his friend that while 
absent in Verona he has rivals in Rome. Hence 
bickerings and reconciliations on his return to the 
city. Lesbia is held lower in his esteem, but he 
owns that he cannot love her the less. He is con- 
tent " to dote yet doubt, suspect yet strongly 
love." At last he hates her, but he loves her too, 
and he writes, in words to which Fenelon points 
as the perfection of passionate simplicity, 

" I hate, yet love : you ask how this is so. 

Who knows ? But I 'm in torment : that I know." x 

The next phase is when he prays only for insensi- 
bility, for deliverance from his passion, as from a 
desperate disease. He apostrophizes himself and 
cries : — 
" Why longer keep thy heart upon the rack ? 
Give to thy soul a higher, nobler aim. 
And tho' thou tear thy heart out, look not back 
In tears upon a love that was thy shame. 

" 'T is hard at once to fling a love away 

That has been cherish'd with the faith of years. 
'T is hard : but shrink not, flinch not. Come what may, 
Crush every record of its joys and fears. 

1 " Odi et amo, quare id faciam fortasse requiris. 

Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior." — Carm. LXXXV. 



THE GROWTH OF HIS PASSION 103 

" O ye great gods, if ye can pity feel, 

If e'er to dying wretch your aid was given, 
See me in agony before you kneel, 

To beg this plague from out my core be driven, 

" Which creeps in drowsy horror thro' each vein, 
Leaves me no thought from bitter anguish free ; 
I do not ask she may be kind again, 
Nor pure : for that can never, never be. 

" I only crave the health that once was mine, 
Some little respite from this sore disease. 
If e'er I earn'd your mercy, powers divine, 

Grant me — O grant to a sick heart some ease." l 

But the most characteristic and the most heart- 
rending of all this series of poems is the one in 
which he pours forth in burning scazons, which 
ring like handfuls of earth thrown on a coffin, his 
agony in remembering happier things ; in which he 
tries to brace himself up to endure, and breaks 
down in a wild burst of rage against his torment- 
ress. The poem might have for its heading those 
divine words in " Christabel : " 

" And to be wroth with one we love 

Doth work like madness in the brain." 

The scazontic metre, which the Greeks call " limp- 
ing" and "broken-hipped," is one of which it is 

1 LXXVI. : " Siqua recordanti benefacta priora voluptas," 
from 10, " Quare jam te cur amplius excrucies ? " to end, 
" O Di, reddite mi hoc pro pietate mea." The version is 
that of Sir Theodore Martin somewhat modified, especially 
in the last verse. 



104 CATULLUS AND THE TRANSITION 

very difficult to reproduce the effect in English. 
Here is an attempt to do so : — 

" Ah, poor Catullus, learn to put away 
Thy childish things. 
The lost is lost, be sure : the task essay 
That manhood brings. 

" Fair shone the skies on thee when thou to fare 
Wast ever fain 
Where the girl beckon'd, lov'd as girl shall ne'er 
Be lov'd again. 

" Yes, fain thou wast for merry mirth ; and she — 
She ne'er said nay. 
Ah, gayly then the morning smil'd on thee 
Each happy day. 

" Now she saith nay : but thou be strong to bear, 
Harden thy heart ; 
Nor nurse thy grief, nor cling to her so fair, 
So fixt to part. 

" Farewell ! I 've learn'd my lesson : I "11 endure, 
Nor try to find 
Words that might wake thy ruth, or even cure 
Thy poison'd mind. 

" Yet will the time come when thy heart shall bleed, 
Accursed one, 
When thou shalt come to eld with none to heed, 
Unwooed, unwon. 

" Who then will seek thee ? Who will call thee fair ? 
Call thee his own ? 
Whose kisses and whose dalliance wilt thou share ? 
Be stone, my heart, be stone ! " 1 

1 " Miser Catulle, desinas ineptire. ... At tu, Catulle, des- 
tinatus obdura " (VIII.). I read imfiote7is ne sis in verse 9 



THE GROWTH OF HIS PASSION 105 

At last he sends her his final farewell. It is by 
the mouth of Furius and Aurelius, no very dear 
friends of his, and thus perhaps he desires to add 
a sting to his repudiation of his cruel mistress. 
His love is dead : " Ruin's ploughshare " has 
driven " elate full on its bloom : " it is as utterly 
destroyed past all retrieval as the wild flower at 
the meadow's edge which the passing plough has 
shorn from its stalk. 1 The poem is in Sapphics, 
and probably that metre was chosen in direct refer- 
ence to his rendering from Sappho in the fifty-first 

of the Latin, and in verse 23 of the Latin I accept Mr. Bury's 
Scelesta, anenti quae tibi manet vita ? It is strange that Mr. 
Postgate has not at least mentioned this brilliant conjecture. 
Anere, " to grow an old woman," is paralleled by senet = 
senescit in IV. 26, and the verb is actually found in Plautus, 
Mercator, IV. 4, 15 : "Satis scitum filum mulieris : verum 
hercle anet " (" a fine figure of a woman, but i' faith she 
grows old "). In the verse before, cum rogaberis nulla 
means " when you will never be asked for." The expression 
is quite characteristic of the Catullian age. Nullus venit, 
" not a bit of him came," and similar phrases, are common 
in the letters of Cicero. 

1 " Pauca nuntiate meae puellae 

Non bona dicta, 
Cum suis vivat valeatque moechis, 
Quos simul complexa tenet trecentos, 
Nullum amans vere, sed identidem omnium 

Ilia rumpens : 
Nee meum respectet ut ante amorem, 
Qui illius culpa cecidit velut prati 
Ultimi flos, praetereunte postquam 

Tactus aratro est." — XI. 15-24. 



106 CATULLUS AND THE TRANSITION 

ode, the only other Sapphic poem in the collection. 
" In this metre," he would say, " I breathed the ex- 
ultation of my love's spring ; and in this I will couch 
the bitter disillusion of its premature decay and my 
deliverance from a long anguish." His life did not 
long survive his love. Probably about this time 
were written those touching lines to Cornificius 
from his sick-bed, in which he tells his friend and 
brother poet that it goes ill with him and is like to 
go worse, asks him for a line, just a few words, and 
pathetically begs him to let the words be suitable 
to his sorry plight, and sadder than the tearful 
dirges in which Simonides was wont to weep those 
that died poets and died young. 1 Macaulay says of 
this little poem, and of the other two which I have 
just quoted: "They affect me more than I can 
explain : they always move me to tears." 

But though the history of Catullus is mainly the 

history of his heart, and though his poems 

poems of of the sensibilities are as exquisite as any 

Catullus. ... . .. ., 

ever written, — more exquisite than any 
other ever written, in the opinion of that great 
scholar and critic, the late H. A. J. Munro, — we 
must remember that the hand which here struck 

1 " Male est, Cornifici, tuo Catullo, 
Male est mehercule et ei ! laboriose, 
Et magis magis in dies et horas. 
Quern tu, quod minimum facillimumque est, 
Qua solatus es adlocutione ? 
Irascor tibi. Sic meos amores? 
Paulum quid lubet adlocutionis 
Maestius lacrimis Simonideis." — XXXVIII. 



OTHER POEMS OF CATULLUS 107 

so true a note did not fail in other keys. Of all 
the poems which he has written, those which ap- 
peal to us at all (for a few of them are utterly 
alien from modern sympathies) are addressed to 
feelings which are independent of time and cir- 
cumstances, and move us now as strongly as they 
moved the Romans who first heard them. His 
deep affection for his brother, who died young in 
the Troad, and whose grave he visited when on a 
tour through " the famous cities of Asia," shows 
that his excesses had not exercised that baneful 
influence on his character which Burns deplores 
in the exclamation, 

" But, oh ! it deadens a' within 
And petrifies the feelin'." 

It is remarkable that he does not seem to antici- 
pate a future conscious existence in which he and 
his brother might meet, though he suggests such a 
source of comfort to his friend Calvus in his grief 
for his beloved Quintilia. How favorably do the 
buoyant hendecasyllables in which he sings of 
the loves of Acme and Septimius compare with the 
artificial prettinesses of Horace on similar themes, 
even in the celebrated amoebaean ode beginning, 

" Donee gratus eram tibi," 

of which a great scholar of the Renaissance said 
that he would rather have written it than be King 
of Spain ! It would be interesting to compare the 
two in detail if our space permitted it. However, 



108 CATULLUS AND THE TRANSITION 

the question between Catullus and Horace, who has 
spoken so slightingly of his truly inspired predeces- 
sor in lyric poetry, has been well debated between 
Munro and Conington, the professors of Latin at 
the time respectively in Cambridge and Oxford. 
The chief heads of the discussion will be found at 
the end of that charming book, Munro's "Criticisms 
and Elucidations of Catullus." I maybe permitted 
to say that I agree with Munro in assigning the 
palm to Catullus as a lyrist, for reasons which will 
be evident to any one who may read the lecture on 
Horace. 

The other shorter poems display a friendliness 
Mistaken and manliness of tone reminding us of 
of Catullus Burns and of Byron, never of Moore, 
with Moore, though Byron in his " English Bards and 
Scotch Reviewers " calls Moore the young Catullus 
of his day. Indeed, this fancied resemblance to 
the Irish lyric poet, who in his polish of diction and 
shallowness of feeling far more closely resembles 
Horace, has had a very unfavorable influence on 
the work of translators of Catullus. Even Sir 
Theodore Martin, by far the best of them, is some- 
times led into the rollicking vein of the Irish melo- 
dist, occasionally even when the Latin is laden 
with the deepest feeling. To illustrate this we 
have only to point to the seventy-fifth poem, begin- 
ning with the words, 

" Nulla potest mulier tantum se dicere amatam," 
and ending with the bitter confession that the poet's 



CATULLUS COMPARED WITH MOORE 109 

heart is so perverted by his enslaver that, though 
nothing now could make him esteem her, yet no- 
thing could make him cease to love her. Surely, 
though the versification is ingenious, the tone is 
missed in the version : 1 — 

" O Lesbia, surely no mortal was ever 
So fond of a woman as I am of you : 
A youth more devoted, more constant was never : 
For me there 's enchantment in all that you do. 

\ " Yes, love has so wholly confused my ideas 

Of right and of wrong, that I '11 dote on you still 
As fondly, as blindly, although you may be as 
Demure or as naughty as ever you will ! " 

Again, in the seventieth poem 2 there is a certain 
dignity and seriousness which has quite disappeared 
in the jaunty light-heartedness of — 

" My mistress says there 's not a man 
Of all the many swains she knows, 
She 'd rather wed than me, not one, 
Though Jove himself were to propose. 

" She says so ; but what woman says 
To him who fancies he has caught her, 
'T is only fit it should be writ 
In air or in the running water." 

1 In the latest edition, 1875, this poem has been retrans- 
lated, but not, I think, improved in tone. 

2 " Nulli se dicit mulier mea nubere malle 

Quam mihi, non si se Jupiter ipse petat. 
Dicit : sed mulier cupido quod dicit amanti 
In vento et rapida scribere oportet aqua." 



110 CATULLUS AND THE TRANSITION 

Moore himself disclosed what a great gulf lay 
between his literary tone and that of Catullus when 
he rendered the celebrated couplet already quoted, 
beginning Odi et amo, into this frigid quatrain : 

" I love thee and hate thee, but if I can tell 

The cause of my love and my hate may I die ! 
I feel it, alas ! I can feel it too well, 

That I love thee and hate thee, but cannot tell why." 

The inimitable ode to his villa at Sirmio has 
been attempted over and over again, but 

villa at Sir- never, as I think, with anything like suc- 
cess. I would only observe that I think 

the last three lines have not been fully explained. 

I would render the lines : — 

" Rejoice, bright Sirmio, in thy master's joy, 
And you, ye wavelets, merrymen of the mere, 
Smile all the smiles ye have to greet me home." l 

Ludins is a "merryman," or "tumbler," and Scali- 
ger saw that under lidie of the MSS. there lurked 
this original and natural comparison of the tum- 
bling wavelets to "merrymen." Certain waterfalls 
in England are still called merrymen by the local 
peasantry ; and one of R. L. Stevenson's clever 
tales is called " The Merry Men," taking its name 
from a waterfall which plays a part in the story. 
In Plautus, 2 when the lover prays the bars of his 

1 " Salve, O venusta Sirmio, atque hero gaude 

Gaudente, vosque, O ludiae lacus undae, 
Ridete quidquid est domi cachinnorum." 

XXXI. 12-14. 

2 " Pessuli, heus pessuli . . . fite causa mea ludii." 

Cure. I. 2. 36. 



THE SHORTER POEMS OF CATULLUS III 

mistress's door to leap up out of their sockets and 
let him in, he cries, " Be merryandrews for my 
sake." Domi habere is " to have at one's com- 
mand," " to keep a stock of." Sir Theodore Mar- 
tin, recognizing the meaning as being " laugh all 
the laughs you have," suggests the pretty render- 
ing, — 

" Let all your wealth of smiles be wreathed for me." 

A version published in London in 1707 gave the 
meaning accurately, but too elaborately, in 

" Laugh till your stock of laughter 's wholly spent, 
And all your magazine of merriment." 

Broadly one would point to the shorter poems 
of Catullus as showing a power of relat- The s h or ter 
ing an incident, or describing a scene, in P oems - 
terse idiomatic Latin, which is approached only by 
Terence in his plays and Cicero in his letters, and 
which is perhaps best exemplified in the tenth 
poem, where Catullus gives a sketch of the re- 
quests to which he was subjected on his return 
from Bithynia. The other most prominent feature 
is his extraordinary power of dealing with metre, 
as displayed in his nuptial ode (LXI.) on the mar- 
riage of Manlius and Vinia, and in his Hymn to 
Diana (XXXIV.), 1 which has been beautifully trans- 
lated by Professor Jebb in " Translations : " — 

1 " Dianae sumus in fide 
Puellae et pueri integri, 
Dianam pueri integri 
Puellaeque canamus." 



112 CATULLUS AND THE TRANSITION 

" Diana guardeth our estate, 
Girls and boys immaculate ; 
Boys and maidens pure of stain, 
Be Diana our refrain. 

" Latonia, pledge of love 
Glorious to most glorious Jove, 
Near the Delian olive-tree 
Latona gave thy life to thee, 

" That thou shouldst be forever queen 
Of mountains and of forests green ; 
Of every deep glen's mystery ; 
Of all streams and their melody : 

" Women in travail ask their peace 
From thee, our Lady of Release : 
Thou art the Watcher of the Ways : 
Thou art the Moon with borrow'd rays : 

" And as thy full or waning tide 
Marks how the monthly seasons glide, 
Thou, Goddess, sendest wealth of store 
To bless the farmer's thrifty floor, 

" Whatever name delights thine ear, 
By that name be thou hallow'd here ; 
And, as of old, be good to us, 
The lineage of Romulus." 

But nowhere is his astonishing mastery of metre 
more triumphantly shown than in that unique liter- 
ary tour de force, the " Attis." 

Of this poem Sellar justly says that, regarded as 
a work of pure imagination, it is the 

The « Attis." , _ _ . . . .. , 

most remarkable poetical creation in the 
Latin language. It tells how Attis, a beautiful 



THE "ATTIS" 113 



youth, the adored of the society in which he 
lived, whom his admirers escorted to the Palaes- 
tra crowned with garlands, finds it suddenly borne 
in upon him in a kind of awakening or conversion 
that he must leave the whole world and cling to 
Cybele ; how he sails with a troop of like-minded 
devotees to the Phrygian Ida, where with tam- 
bours and cymbals, with trumpets also and with 
shawms, they worship the great turret-crowned 
Mother till sleep overcomes them on the top of 
the mountain ; how, when the sun rises in the 
morning, it repents Attis of the service of the 
Goddess ; and how Cybele unyokes from her car 
a lion, which pursues him back into the forest and 
terrifies him into obedience. Catullus does not 
seem to have followed any of the legends which 
have come down to us, but to have taken a mere 
empty mould of a story, and to have poured into it 
a hot flood of strange Oriental fanatic passion, quite 
alien from Roman sentiment and experience. The 
very conception of the beautiful and much-courted 
youth is un-Roman, yet there is nothing extant 
which even hints at a like poem in Greek, and the 
" Attis " certainly forces on our minds the impres- 
sion of an original creation. The poem is utterly 
untranslatable into English. The sudden change 
of gender which intimates that the votary of Cy- 
bele has become her votaress, the tumultuous rush 
of the metre in which most of the lines end in 
five short syllables, the numerous diminutives and 
strange compound words, all render it inimitable. 



114 CATULLUS AND THE TRANSITION 

Tennyson's experiment in this metre is no doubt 
familiar to most readers, and perhaps George Mere- 
dith's. They and Professor Ellis have at least 
caught the salient feature of the rhythm, that 
agglomeration of short syllables at the end of the 
verse, which suggested to Tennyson — by far the 
best of the imitators — the employment of polysyl- 
lables in that place with the accent thrown back 
as far as possible, words like " legionaries," " char- 
ioted," " confederacy." The last attempt made is 
by Mr. Grant Allen, who in a little book forming the 
sixth volume of the Carabas Library has endeav- 
ored with some ingenuity to connect the Attis myth 
with tree-worship. But his rhythm does not seem 
to me even remotely to suggest that of Catullus. 
His first lines are — 

"Across the roaring ocean, with eye and with heart of 
flame, 
To the Phrygian forest Attis in an eager frenzy came," — 

a tame and tranquil movement to my ear, suggest- 
ing the metre of the well-known missionary hymn, 

" From Greenland's icy mountains, from India's coral 
strand," 

rather than the torrent rush of the Catullian strain. 
I regard the metre as antispastic, to use a techni- 
cal term, each line showing an iambic succeeded 
by a trochaic movement. The device by which 
Catullus imparted to his metre such an irresistible 
rush and impetus was the frequent resolution of 
the long syllable of the final dactyl, — an effect im- 



FIGURE BORROWED BY TENNYSON 1 1 5 

possible to reproduce in English, in which we can- 
not pronounce together five short (that is, unac- 
cented) syllables, like "sonipedibus," " hederigera," 
"columinibus," " nemorivagus." 

It is interesting to observe how Tennyson's fine 
classical instinct — fortified no doubt by „. 

J Figure bor- 

careful study, probably of some exhaust- rowed by 
ive commentary like that of Professor from the 
Ellis, where the point to which I am 
about to refer is duly noted — kept him right in a 
splendid line which ,he borrowed from the " Attis " 
for his "Tithonus." I refer to the noble passage 
where the horses of the Sun 

" Shake the darkness from their loosen'd manes, 
And beat the twilight into flakes of fire." 

Surely Tennyson had in his mind the passage in 
the "Attis " where Catullus says of the rising Sun, 

" And he smote on the dim dawn's path with the hoofs of 
his fiery chariot-steeds." l 

A less learned and accomplished scholar than 
Tennyson might have supposed that Catullus had 
present to his fancy the much less striking figure 
of the Sun "driving away the darkness of night ;" 
but the Latin is fortunately decisive and inexo- 

1 "Pepulitque noctis umbras vegetis sonipedibus." — LXIII. 41. 

The magnificent phrase, " the dim dawn's path," for " the 
morning sky," reminds us of Milton's 

" Thither came Uriel flying through the even," 

where Bentley, with such strange lack of poetic feeling, 
wished to correct " even " to " heaven." 



Il6 CATULLUS AND THE TRANSITION 

rable : pellere in Catullus never means " to drive 
away," always " to smite," "to strike." An igno- 
rance of the usage of the poet would rob him of a 
most magnificent piece of imagery. This delicate 
touch has been missed by Mr. Grant Allen, who 
thus renders the sunrise passage : — 

" But when golden-visaged Phoebus with radiant eyes again 
Surveyed the fleecy ether, solid land, and roaring main, 
And with mettlesome chargers scattered the murky shades 

of night, 
Then Attis swift awakened, and Sleep fled fast from his 

sight." 

Though some of the poems of Catullus dance 
Sadness of like those waves of the Lago di Garda 
Catullus. which he calls "merrymen," yet we have 
in him, as in all the great Latin poets, a prevailing 
chord of sadness, a mournful minor key. Even 
his gay dedication of his yacht, which "declares 
no pinnace could outstrip her," ends with the sad 
reflection, "portion and parcel of the past." 1 As 
Dante in his "Vita Nuova " tells us with what 
agony the thought came to him that Beatrice could 
die, so Catullus even in his wildest rapture cannot 
put aside the thought of the darkness of death, 

" Into whose maw goes all that 's prettiest," 2 

and the certainty that 

" Suns will rise and set again : 

But for us, when once doth wane 

1 " Sed haec prius fuere." — IV. 25. 

2 " At vobis male sit, malae tenebrae 

Orci, quae omnia bella devoratis." — III. 13, 14. 



THE LINK WITH AUGUSTAN POETRY 11/ 

This poor pageant's little light, 
We must sleep in endless night." 1 

Lucretius and Catullus we have already* found 
coupled together by Cornelius Nepos as 
representing the culminating point of connecting 

T^ , , • A 1 XT llnk Wlth 

.Republican poetry. And JNepos was Augustan 
right. "When we find," writes Momm- poe iy ' 
sen, 2 "not merely his contemporaries electrified by 
these fugitive songs, but the art critics of the 
Augustan age also characterizing him along with 
Lucretius as the most important poet of this epoch, 
his contemporaries as well as his successors were 
completely right. The Latin nation has produced 
no second poet in whom the artistic substance 
and the artistic form appear in so symmetrical 
perfection as in Catullus. And in this sense the 
collection of the poems of Catullus is certainly 
the most perfect which Latin poetry as a whole 
can show." Catullus is, moreover, the connecting 
link between the Republican and the Augustan 
school. The " Marriage of Peleus and Thetis," 
his longest piece by far, has been shown by Munro 
to be the work of his last year of life, and it dis- 
plays unmistakable signs of a perusal of the poem 
of Lucretius. It is elaborately, one might almost 
say awkwardly, constructed on the Alexandrine 
model. But we cannot help feeling that the word 

1 " Soles occidere et redire possunt : 

Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux 

Nox est perpetua una dormienda." — V. 4-6. 

2 Roman History, iv. 591, Eng. Trans. 



1 18 CATULLUS AND THE TRANSITION 

" awkward " is ill-associated with such a poem, even 
though the laws of art cry out against the long epi- 
sode which in a not very long poem tells so beauti- 
fully the sad tale of the desertion of Ariadne. To 
take the least enthusiastic view of it, it is interest- 
ing as the earliest specimen in Latin of a careful 
effort to construct a really epic poem in hexameters. 
It is the first example of that thoroughly diligent 
elaboration which Horace enjoins on his contempo- 
raries, and of which Virgil and Ovid had conceived 
so high an ideal. It is from this point of view that 
Catullus has been well called by M. Patin " La 
Preface du siecle d'Auguste." 

The successive stages in the elegiac poetry of 
Elegiac the Augustan age are marked by Pro- 
theAu-° pertius, Tibullus, and Ovid. The early 
gustanage. Greek elegy was as opposite as possi- 
ble in its spirit to the elegy of the Augustan age. 
Callinus and Tyrtaeus employed it to rouse their 
countrymen to patriotism and heroism ; Solon 
made politics its theme ; and Theognis and Pho- 
cylides enshrined in it their proverbial philoso- 
phy and shrewd moralizings on life. Mimnermus 
is the only early Greek elegiac poet whose muse 
is associated with love. It is the Alexandrine 
poets, Philetas, Callimachus, and Euphorion, to 
whom Cicero refers as the models of " the new 
school " (ol i/ewrept^ovTes), and who really gave its 
tone and scope to the Latin elegy. With Proper- 
tius love is still ardent passion, but the character- 
istic reverence and seriousness, the gravitas of the 



PROPERTIUS 119 

Roman character, has deepened into gloom ; in 
Tibullus love is tender affection mixed with melan- 
choly, and there is still strong sympathy with the 
grandeur of the Roman character and state ; in 
Ovid love is mere pleasure, intrigue, gallantry, 
and all gravitas has completely disappeared. Love 
is with him merely physical desire, and the lover 
aspires to nothing better than bonne fortune. 
The poet has forgotten how to suffer like Catullus, 
and has learned how picturesque it is to souffrir 
like Alfred de Musset. Ovid prepares us for the 
state of morals which called forth the sarcasms of 
Tacitus and the execrations of Juvenal. 

The late Professor Sellar, in his valuable volume 
on Horace and the elegiac poets, which 
appeared after his lamented death, has 
happily remarked that readers of Propertius in the 
present day will be disposed, according to their 
temperament, to apostrophize him in one or other 
of two verses from his own poems. Those who 
feel neither his own personality nor that which he 
has imparted to his Cynthia to be very congenial, 
and who think that it is possible to have too much 
of lovers' quarrels and reconciliations, — that love 
is, after all, only the flower of life, not its root or 
even its fruit, — will shut up the book of his poems, 
exclaiming in his own words, — 

" Maxima de nilo nascitur historia." 

The more sympathetic readers will say with a 

' sigh, — 

" Ardoris nostri^magne poeta jaces." 



120 CATULLUS AND THE TRANSITION 

To the one the four books of elegies will be " much 
ado about nothing ; " to the others Propertius will 
ever be " the bard that lent love's passion words." 
I belong to the latter class, and that is the reason 
why I have put him before Tibullus, to whom 
chronologically he is somewhat posterior. When 
we leave Propertius, we abandon really ardent sin- 
cerity in the expression of the passion of love, 
never again to meet it in Latin poetry. 
The poetry of Tibullus is to his — 

" As moonlight unto sunlight and as water unto wine." 

The characteristic of Tibullus is not ardor, but 
tenderness and self-abnegation. He writes to 
Delia with apparent sincerity : — 

" I am not worth a single tear of hers ; " 1 

and after she has proved faithless to him, he can 
express a grateful and affectionate re- 
membrance of her mother. 2 He depre- 
cates the life of a soldier because he prefers the 
peaceful joys of the country, not for the reason of 
Propertius, that time is wasted which is not spent 
in love. Tibullus might have written sincerely : — 

" I could not love thee, dear, so much, 
Loved I not honor more." 

1 " Non ego sum tanti ploret ut ilia semel." 

2 " Vive diu mihi dulcis anus : proprios ego tecum, 

Sit modo fas, annos contribuisse velim : 
Te semper natamque tuam te propter amabo : 
Quidquid agit sanguis est tamen ilia tuus." 

I. 6. 63. 



PROPERTIUS AND OVID COMPARED 121 

To Propertius such a sentiment would have been 
a blasphemy against love, on whose shrine every- 
thing, even honor, ought to be sacrificed. 

Propertius does not seem to have been congenial 
to his contemporaries. Horace sneers at 

. Propertius 

him more than once, and it has been sug- and Ovid 
gested that Propertius was the bore whom 
he met on the Sacred Way. 1 But, whatever were 
the personal characteristics of Propertius, he was 
undoubtedly a great poet. If one had to select 
the finest poems written in Latin elegiacs, perhaps 
one would not err in choosing that poem in which 
Propertius describes the ghost of Cynthia appear- 
ing to him immediately after burial, 2 

" Sunt aliquid Manes : letum non omnia finit," 

and the address 3 of Cornelia to her husband begin- 
ning, 

" Desine, Paulle, meum lacrimis urgere sepulcrum." 

Aeacus, in an admirable passage in the "Ranae " 
of Aristophanes, suggests that the question of su- 
periority between Aeschylus and Euripides might 
be decided by placing verses of each poet in a bal- 

1 Mr. Bury, in his masterly history of the Roman Empire 
to the death of M. Aurelius, pointedly writes of him : " He 
seems to have been a man of weak will, and this is reflected 
in his poetry. It has been noticed by those who have stud- 
ied his language that he prefers to express feelings as possi- 
ble rather than as real; his thoughts naturally run in the 
potential mood." 

2 IV. 7. 3 IV. ii. 



122 CATULLUS AND THE TRANSITION 

ance and weighing, them by butcher's weight. 1 
Tried by this test, his pentameters would make 
those of Ovid kick the beam. In Ovid the penta- 
meter always "falleth in melody back." In Pro- 
pertius it often soars above the " silvery column " 
of the hexameter, and dominates the couplet. 
Ovid would probably have thrown into the scale 
the fine pentameter which is engraved over the 
cemetery in Richmond by the banks of the James 
River, — the cemetery which contains all that is 
mortal of the Southern victims of the American 
civil war : — 

" Qui bene pro patria cum patriaque jacent." 

But Propertius would have been able to choose one 
of half a dozen pentameters laden with weighty 
meaning to set against it : perhaps the pentameter 
admired so much by Dean Merivale, — 

" Jura dare et statuas inter et arma Mari ; " 
or the proud boast of Cornelia when she pointed to 
the blameless life of Paullus and herself from their 
marriage to her death, — 

" Viximus insignes inter utramque facem ; " 

or the verse wherein the poet, thinking of the 
"vast and wandering grave" which whelmed the 
young life of his friend Paetus, exclaims in that 
elegiac ode which Sellar aptly compares to the 
" Lycidas," — 

" Nunc tibi pro tumulo Carpathium omne mare est." 

1 ri Se ; /meiaywyfja-ovai ttjv rpayuMav, — Ran. 798. 



OVID 123 



Ovid never even attempts to deal seriously with 

love except when he describes the pas- 

-C r • i.- 0vid - 

sion of a woman for a man, as in his 

"Heroides," and there we meet a quality in his 
style which at once marks him out as the herald of 
the Silver Age, — the rhetorical tinge with which 
the letters from the heroines are imbued and which 
recalls to our minds the suasoriae of the schools of 
rhetoric. This defect is less seen in the poems in 
which Ovid was more sincere, as in the "Art of 
Love," which was justly regarded by Macaulay as 
the greatest of Ovid's works, and which reminds 
Sellar of Byron's " Don Juan," as a poem in which 
a true vein of real poetry occasionally mingles with 
cynical worldliness and warm sensuousness. But 
the rhetorical strain is very present in the " Meta- 
morphoses," for which the poet himself claims the 
palm, and to which he trusts for his immortality. 
The attractiveness of this work lies in its descrip- 
tions, — another mark, as we shall see, of the Silver 
Age ; but the attempt to divest it of the char- 
acter of a Dictionary of Mythology by interweav- 
ing the stories after the fashion of the " Arabian 
Nights " is only partially successful. Sellar points 
out how his gods are emptied of all dignity and 
grandeur, adding the just and acute remark, 
" Though in no ancient poem do the gods play a 
larger part, no work is more irreligious." If any 
one desires to see how a dainty conceit may be 
made not only gross but grotesque by a foul im- 
agination, let him compare the fifteenth poem in 



124 CATULLUS AND THE TRANSITION 

the second book of the " Amores " with the " fool- 
ish song" in "The Miller's Daughter," begin- 
ning, — 

" It is the miller's daughter. 

And she is grown so dear, so dear, 
That I would be the jewel 

That trembles at her ear ; 
For hid in ringlets day and night 

I 'd touch her neck so warm and white." 

In the "Tristia" and " Ex Ponto " we have an at- 
tempt to misapply the elegiac muse, and to force 
her whose song should be of 

" The hope, the fear,, the jealous care, 
The exalted portion of the pain 
And power of love," 

to record the petty troubles of une time disorients, 
a soul ill at ease amid its surroundings. We 
could have well spared the "Fasti," — a mechanical 
effort to produce the effect of a patriotism which 
the writer did not feel, and to efface the inefface- 
able impression of lightness and insincerity which 
his poetry leaves. We should have been fortunate 
if we had preserved in its place his tragedy, the 
" Medea," which ancient critics pronounced to be 
his masterpiece. In the " Remedia Amoris " and 
the " Medicamina Facie " we have an example of 
the most impossible of all feats which a writer can 
essay — the attempt to imitate his past self. Many 
writers have achieved amazing imitations of others, 
but those who have tried to reproduce the pecul- 
iarities of their former selves have always failed 



OVID 125 



pathetically. Nevertheless, no other classical poet 
has furnished more ideas than Ovid to the Italian 
poets and painters of the Renaissance, and to our 
own early poetry from Chaucer to Pope, who, like 
Ovid, 

" Lisped in numbers, for the numbers came." 



VIRGIL. 

No poet or writer of antiquity, we may safely af- 
firm, no uninspired writer except perhaps Aristotle, 
. has had a greater influence on the world 

Influence of ° 

Virgil on of thought and letters than Virgil. Aris- 

subsequent . r .. 

thought and totle, of course, m the hands of the school- 
men was for centuries the only study of 
Europe ; his philosophy has thus usurped a very 
undue share of the attention of civilization, and 
has through the Latin impressed its mark on all 
the languages which have a Latin basis. To it, 
and to it alone, we owe such common words as "ac- 
tually," "habit," "predicament," "energy," "mo- 
tive," "maxim," "principle," and many others. 
The peddler who recommends the "quality" of his 
wares, and offers a reduction on taking a " quan- 
tity," little thinks that he is using words which, but 
for the philosophy of Aristotle, would never have 
found their way into his language. But the influ- 
ence of Virgil on posterity, though not so direct, is 
perhaps quite as marked, and is the more wonderful 
as exercised, not by a teacher, but by a singer. 

The impression produced by him was as imme- 
diate as it was intense. Horace said of him that 
nature never produced a fairer soul, and Propertius 
prophesied that his coming epic would surpass the 



IMMEDIATE AND ENDURING SUCCESS 1 27 

"Iliad." When he entered the theatre, an awk- 
ward, slovenly youth with toga all awry, His success 
the house rose to do him honor. The ^ ediate 
" Aeneid " furnished the text-book which enduring. 
taught Seneca, Petronius, and Juvenal what per- 
fection was possible for their native tongue. Taci- 
tus conned it till the Virgilian diction so colored 
his style that a Virgilian parallel often dispels the 
obscurity of a corrupt passage in the "Annals " or 
" Histories," and still oftener decides the question 
between two rival emendations. St. Augustine 
often refers to Virgil as the highest bloom of pagan 
art. A legend of the Middle Ages relates how St. 
Paul, coming on the tomb of Virgil, exclaimed, 
" What a man I should have made of you if I had 
met you in your life ! " 1 From the mists of the 
Middle Ages he peers out at us as the mightiest of 
magicians who have — 

" Learned the art that none may name 
In Padua far beyond the sea ; " 

and in a mediaeval romance, " Reynard the Fox," 
Virgil and Aristotle are coupled together as en- 
chanters. Dante took him by the hand to lead 
him from the ancient to the modern world. " Or 
se' tu quel Virgilio," — these are the words of awe 
and veneration with which Dante in the " Divina 
Commedia " greets his immortal predecessor in Ital- 

\ " Quern te, inquit, reddidissem 
Si te vivium invenissem, 

Poetarum maxime ! " 



128 VIRGIL 



ian poetry. The modern world at once welcomes 
him through the mouth of Bacon, who calls him 
" the chastest poet and royalest that to the memory 
of man is known." The very stones cry out. 
Scratched on the baths of Titus have been found 
the words tantae mo lis erat, and on a wall in Pom- 
peii is scribbled conticuere omnes. From his own 
time to the present century, Virgil has been recog- 
nized as the type of perfection in poetry. Before 
the year 1 500, ninety editions of his work had been 
published, and so many since the revival of letters 
that there are said to be as many editions as the 
years that have passed since his death. 

The reaction against Virgil which the present 
century has witnessed may be said to 

Reaction J J 

against date from the epoch-making lectures of 

Virgil in ... 1 . , 

the present Niebuhr ; and since that time the ques- 
cen my. \\qx\. whether Virgil deserves a place 
among the great poets of the world has been a duel 
between France and Germany, in which all the 
cunning of fence has been on the side of France. 
His ascendency in France was early and complete. 
Scaliger ranked him above Homer and Theocritus; 
and Voltaire said, " If Homer is the creator of 
Virgil, Virgil is certainly the finest of his works." 
Voltaire, according to M. Renan, understood nei- 
ther the Bible, nor Homer, nor Greek art, nor 
the ancient religions, nor Christianity, nor the 
Middle Ages, yet is a most instructive writer, for 
he had the courage<of his convictions and always 
spoke out. " Virgil," writes Sainte-Beuve, " the 



COMPARISON WITH HOMER 1 29 

moment when he appeared, became at once the poet 
of all the Latin races." On the other hand, Ger- 
many has followed the lead of Niebuhr : Bern- 
hardy and Teuff el deny him all creative power ; and 
Mommsen classes the " Aeneid " with epics like 
the " Henriad " and the " Messiad." The English 
school has been nearly as enthusiastic as the 
French, and has recently made a splendid contri- 
bution to the fame of Virgil in the magnificent ode 
of Tennyson, to which I shall have further occasion 
to refer. 

Undoubtedly Virgil has suffered most from a 
comparison with Homer, and especially comparison 
since the quite recent awakening of im- Wlth Homer - 
aginative interest in periods of nascent and imma- 
ture civilization. The critics of the last century 
felt an interest in past ages only in so far as they 
presented points of similarity to their own ; hence 
they delighted in the subjectivity and the con- 
scious power of the Latin epic, and failed to find 
any attraction in the insouciance, naivete, and child- 
like simplicity of the Greek. Time, it may safely 
be anticipated, will still more completely confirm 
the primacy of the Greek epic ; but in the mean 
while it may be interesting to point to certain fea- 
tures in the Latin poem which present a strong 
contrast to the Greek. 

It has been denied that the " Aeneid " is an epic 
poem at all. This question is not very important. 
The " Aeneid," like the rose, " by any other name 
will smell as sweet." Undoubtedly it endeavors, 



130 VIRGIL 



and with but moderate success, to reconcile two 
conflicting elements — a traditional epic 

The Aeneid f r 

as an epic framework, and the feelings and manners 
of Virgil's own highly artificial age. No 
one can fail to observe at once the prevailing 
effort to reproduce Homer externally. His char- 
acters are borrowed, his similes, his incidents, 
even some of the most trifling, as when Nisus 
in the " Aeneid " 1 loses the race in consequence 
of precisely the same misadventure which befell 
Ajax in the " Iliad." 2 But when we look for in- 
ternal resemblance, when we view the poems as it 
were from within, and ask how each poet looked 
at the world, the contrast is what strikes us. 
Wherein ought two epic poets to agree more 
closely than in their way of regarding war ? Here 
we find the difference between Homer and Virgil 
most marked. No sooner is the Greek 

Contrast . 

with the poet in the melee of the combatants than 
he is drunk with the joy of battle ; it is 
his delight to chronicle the most ghastly wounds, 
and to tell how the victor jeers at his prostrate 
foe. The Latin poet, in the tenth book of the 
" Aeneid," forces himself to sustain for a while 
this uncongenial strain. But his heart is not in 
it. He gives us, as in duty bound, the arm hang- 
ing from the shoulder by the sinews, the thick 
blood vomited from the dying mouth, and tells 
how the slayer, 



i V. 333. 2 XXIII. 774. 



GENTLENESS OF MOOD 131 

" Tugging hard with labor wrenches back 
The weapon striking deep amid the bones." L 

But he turns even more gladly than the reader 
from the sickening scene, and takes refuge in a 
mere list of killed and killers : 2 — 

" Caedicus Alcathoum obtruncat, Sacrator Hydaspen ; 
Partheniumque Rapo et praedurum viribus Orsen ; 
Messapus Cloniumque Lycaoniumque Ericeten." 

In VII. 481, he speaks of "the cursed lust insane 
of war and blood." 3 Even in the very Gentleness 
thick of the fight, instead of luxuriating of mood - 
in the carnage like his Greek master, his mood is 
so gentle that when he relates the painful incident 
of the death of the twin sons of Daucus by the 
hands of Pallas, his first thought is what a joy the 
twins must have been to their parents, who, — 

" Sore perplext, each for the other took, 
Nor wished the sweat uncertainty resolved." 4 

When Aeneas 5 thrusts his spear through the tunic 
of Lausus, we read how it 

" rent the vest 
His mother's hand had broidered o'er with gold." 

1 X. 383. This is the version of Canon Thornhill, which, 
with other recent versions, is further considered in an Ap- 
pendix on recent translations of Virgil. Meantime I will 
give his, Conington's, or Morris's renderings of passages 
from Books VI I. -XI I., and Sir C. Bowen's for Books 
I.-VI. 

2 X. 747-749. 3 " Scelerata insania belli." 
4 X. 302. 5 X. 818. 



132 VIRGIL 



His heart is not in the battle ; he is really on the 
Contrast side of the mothers who curse it. 1 He 

Sjoyment e of tells us > not how the braves reveled in 
battle. the delight of the approaching conflict, 

but how the mothers felt its horrors, — 

" And trembling caught their children to their breasts." 2 

Homer's Zeus can afford to neglect the murmurs 
of the other Olympians, so long as he can feed his 
eyes on the sight that he loved : — 

" Apart from the rest he sate, and to fill his eyes was fain 
With the gleam of the brass and the fate of the slayers and 
them that were slain." 3 

We sometimes meet a passage in the " Iliad " 
which makes us feel uncertain whether we are in 
presence of the childhood of the world, or of some- 
thing more like its modern barbarism, — in myth- 
land or in Zululand. When Iphidamas falls under 
the sword of Agamemnon, 4 the poet commiserates 
his fate in perishing, 

" Or e'er he had joy of his bride and the gifts that he gat 
her withal," 

and then goes on to detail the valuable considera- 
tion, one hundred beeves, one thousand goats, and 
so forth, which he had given for a bride he was 
never to possess : the pity of it was that he had had 
no return for his expenditure. If this way of look- 

1 "Bellaque matribus detestata." — Hor. Od. I. i. 25. 

2 " Et trepidae matres pressere ad pectora natos." 

3 //. XI. 75. 4 //. XI. 240. 



VIRGIUAN CATALOGUES 1 33 

ing at wedded love is essential to the true epic 
vein, we have something to console us for the 
absence of the epic spirit in the anima cortese 
Mantovana. 

It is probably to this reluctance to deal with 
scenes of carnage that we owe a very „. ... 

J Virgilian 

charming feature in the "Aeneid." It catalogues 

1 i r 1 -ill compared 

is because he ieels constrained to look with 
for other means of interesting his read- 
ers in the war that he gives his picturesque and 
elaborate descriptions of the gatherings of the 
leaguered clans, with their arms and accoutre- 
ments, which, in the magic use made of historic 
names, remind us of like qualities in Scott and 
Milton, and which transcend in affluent detail and 
poetic coloring the meagre catalogues of the " Iliad," 
as much as the Homeric battle-pieces surpass the 
Virgilian. In Homer the different Greek peo- 
ples are all exactly the same, and differ very little 
from the Trojans ; in Virgil some dozen tribes 
are minutely differentiated. Moreover, those same 
catalogues have enabled him to give detailed ex- 
pression to his enthusiastic invocation in the 
" Georgics " of his native land : *■ — 

" Hail, clime of Saturn ! mighty mother of tilth, 
Mighty mother of heroes ! " 

1 G. II. 173. On the subject of Virgil's catalogues, Mr. 
Gladstone observes : "Virgil, in his imitation of the Homeric 
catalogues, . . . with vast and indeed rather painful effort, 
carries us through his long list at a laboriously sustained 
elevation." Nettleship has admirably shown that the cata- 



134 VIRGIL 



All this is, of course, conscious art, and brings be- 
Conscious ^ ore us an a & e which looks behind and 
art of Virgil. arounc [ itself like a man, not straight in 
front like a child. Thersites is as hideous as the 
spiteful sister, or the wicked uncle, or the bad giant 
must be perforce in the child's fairy tale, which can 
see no goodness in things evil, and does not care to 
make any appeal to experience to correct the exu- 
berance of fancy. Here, as a contrast, is the tem- 
perately drawn picture of Drances, the Thersites 
of the "Aeneid" i 1 — 

" True to his wont, unfailing Drances rose, 
His spiteful soul by Turnus' glory vexed, 
And thwart-eyed envy's bitter-rankling stings, — 
Rich, nor withal a niggard of his wealth 
For party needs ; ready and shrewd of tongue, 

logue is an essential and integral part in the design of the 
Aeneid, which puts before its readers an Italy infested by 
savages, and even monsters, but finally, through the agency of 
Aeneas, subdued and civilized. In addition to this, the cata- 
logue is highly interesting as an instance of the first attempt 
to enlist archaeology in the service of imagination, — an effort 
which has, " with, indeed, rather painful effort," been made 
by M. Flaubert in Salammbo. Other statements of Mr. 
Gladstone concerning Virgil, in his Homeric Studies, show a 
curious inaccuracy, combined with a definiteness of language 
which experience has since taught him to avoid. When he 
wrote (vol. iii. p. 532) that Virgil " has nowhere placed on 
his canvas the figure of the bard among the abodes of 
men," it is strange that he should have forgotten not only 
Cretheus (IX. 774), but even the bard Iopas, who occupies 
such a prominent place at Dido's feast, fully described at the 
close of the first book of the Aeneid. 
1 XI. 336. 



VIRGIL'S CONSCIOUS ART 135 

But cold and spiritless of hand for war; 
No mean adviser deem'd at council board ; 
A deep intriguer, versed in all the arts 
Of faction and cabal." 

Exaggeration Virgil is studious to avoid ; yet he 
will actually reverse the truth in the interests of 
art. What could be more charming than the pic- 
ture which he draws of the fleet of Aeneas gliding 
up the Tiber : — 

" So grateful now with shouts auspicious raised 
They speed their way begun, the well-pitched keels 
All slipping lightly through the shoaly flood, 
While woods and waves with utter wonder see 
The shields of warriors flashing far ahead, 
And painted hulls afloat upon the stream ; 
With beat of oars they wear out day and night, 
And, mounting, leave full many a bend behind 
And lengthy reach, with varied foliage fringed, 
And, pictured in the river's stilly depths, 
Cleave the green forests 'neath the grassy plain." x 

His learning told him that, at the time of Aeneas' 
supposed arrival in Italy, and long after, the banks 
which bordered the river near its mouth were a 
waste of sandy flats. 2 But no frowning scene should 
meet the eyes of the fated author of the Roman 
race. He describes the Ostia of his own day, with 
its charming environs, with the banks of the river 
dotted with villas and gardens to the very city, 

1 VIII. 91. 

2 Servius tells us that the historian, Fabius Maximus, de- 
scribes the region bordering the mouth of the Tiber as 
" agrum macerrimum litorosissimumque." 



136 VIRGIL 

while its surface is gay with a flotilla of pleasure- 
boats. 

But we must remember that we are not reading 
in the "Aeneid " a modern romance. The 

Aeneid not 

to be treated character of Aeneas has been condemned 

as a romance. . c ,. ,. , , , -, , 

as imperfectly realized, and as cold and 
unfeeling ; even his good qualities, such as his filial 
piety, have been ridiculed 1 as un-epic. But one 
charge has been brought against the treatment of 
his character which rests on a completely modern 
conception. It is alleged that the real hero of the 
poem is Turnus, who is ready to die for the woman 
whom he loves ; and Mr. Gladstone especially dwells 
on " the superior character and attractions of Tur- 
nus." On this point I would quote the acute and 
decisive comment of the late Professor Nettle- 
ship : — 

"When Aeneas lands in Latium to seek the alli- 
ance of Latinus and to found his city, divine 
oracles, widely known throughout the Italian cities, 
had spoken of a stranger who was to wed Latinus* 
daughter, and to lay the foundation of a world- 
wide empire. Aeneas, through his ambassador, 
announces his landing, and asks for a simple alli- 
ance with Latinus ; Latinus offers this and the 

1 Among the pictures found at Pompeii is one which cari- 
catures the flight of Aeneas from Troy. It represents an ape 
in armor carrying an aged ape on its shoulders, and lead- 
ing a young one by the hand. Compare also Ovid, Trist. II. 
533, 534, where he cannot resist a jest at the expense of the 
immaculate Aeneas. 



AENEID NOT A ROMANCE 1 37 

hand of his daughter besides. The king can in 
any case bestow his daughter as he chooses ; and 
in reading Virgil it must be remembered always 
that Lavinia is never really betrothed to Turnus, 
who is only a suitor among other suitors, and dif- 
fering from the rest in nothing but his ancestry 
and his beauty, and in having the favor of the 
queen-mother Amata on his side. To stir up a war 
for the sake of mere personal inclination against a 
cause manifestly favored by the will of the gods 
would, from the point of view of the ancient reli- 
gions, as surely have been thought impious and 
perverse as, from a modern point of view, it ap- 
pears natural to centre our interest on the adven- 
turous warrior who is ready to sacrifice his life for 
his love. But Virgil is not to be read as if he 
were a modern writer of romance, but to be inter- 
preted according to the ideas of his time. We 
find in the ' Aeneid ' no genuine trace of sympa- 
thy either for Turnus or for the cause which he 
represents. Such sympathy is a feeling induced 
by the spirit and associations of modern literature. 
When the treaty between Aeneas and Latinus is 
apparently concluded, it is the element of obstinate 
female passion, represented among the gods by 
Juno, and among men by the queen Amata, joined 
to the headstrong violence of Turnus, which con- 
founds the peace and embroils all in a long series 
of discord. The queen of heaven, unable to bend 
the gods above, stoops to move the powers of hell." 
We must not expect in Aeneas a character with 



138 VIRGIL 



whom we can sympathize from a romantic point 
of view. He is the Man of Destiny, 

Fine . J ' 

manners of and must go where the Fates lead him. 
But he has all the high qualities which 
may belong to the Man of Destiny. His manners 
are always princely ; even in the scenes where he 
is forced to cast off Dido, impelled as he is by a 
higher will than his own, he preserves the grand 
air, a mien worthy of Aristotle's Megalopsyche. 
The episode of the death of Lausus strikes the 
note of mediaeval chivalry ; the noble words ad- 
dressed by Aeneas to the dying boy might have 
been spoken by Sir Launcelot, or shall we say Sir 
Percivale or Sir Galahad ? For the character of 
Aeneas, as has been observed by Sellar, " is more 
like that of the milder among the spiritual rulers 
of mediaeval Rome than that either of the Homeric 
heroes or of the actual consuls and imperators who 
commanded the Roman armies and administered 
the affairs of the Roman state. It has been said 
of him that he was more fitted to be the founder of 
an order of monks than of an empire." 

But the mission of Aeneas was no quest of the 
Holy Grail, but to carry out the divine decree by 
which Rome was to rule the world for the world's 
good. 

Virgil showed great judgment in his choice of 
Aeneas as his hero. He was determined to aban- 
don the mythological epic handled so skillfully by 
the Alexandrine school of poetry. Varro Atacinus, 
Cornelius Gallus, Calvus, and Catullus — the last 



CHOICE OF AENEAS AS A HERO 1 39 

with distinguished success — had worked this vein ; 
and Statius and Valerius Flaccus were , . 

Choice of 

destined afterwards to achieve with it a Aeneas as 
success which we now find it difficult 
to understand. In the beginning of the third 
Georgic, however, Virgil declares his belief that 
that vein is exhausted, omnia jam vulgata, and he 
resolves not to adopt it. On the other hand, the 
historical epic had been successful in the hands 
of Ennius and Naevius, and was destined again to 
win laurels for Silius Italicus and Lucan. Even 
in his own time, poems were constructed on the 
defeat of Vercingetorix and the death of Caesar. 
Neither of those two schools of poetry did Virgil 
propose to join. He wished to take a middle 
course, and to write an epic which should re- 
semble one school in taking for its plot the for- 
tunes of Rome, and the other in linking itself with 
the cycle of Greek mythology. In the " Eclogues " 
and " Georgics " he had begun by seeking his in- 
spiration from Alexandria; and in the "Aeneid" 
we often find him walking in the steps of the Alex- 
andrine poets, especially Apollonius Rhodius. Yet 
in the same poem so close a follower is he of the 
old singer of his country's weal and woe that Seneca 
calls him an Ennianist, — no term of praise in his 
mouth. Indeed, as a poem which, while professedly 
relating the adventures of an individual, really has 
for its hero the poet's own nation, the "Aeneid" 
resembles no work of imagination so closely as it 
resembles the series of Shakespeare's historical 
plays. 



140 VIRGIL 



Virgil found the required link between the two 
kinds of epic in the person of Aeneas, and he had 
in him a hero in every way fitted for his purpose. 
Aeneas is invariably put by Homer in a most dig- 
nified light. He is coupled with Hector as one 
of the two great champions of Troy ; it is to him 
that appeal is made in time of trouble, and he 
never fails to answer it. His first appearance in 
the " Iliad" 1 has little to suggest to us the re- 
served and somewhat stilted hero of the " Aeneid." 
He comes out " like a lion," and rushes on Dio- 
mede with a terrible roar. Diomede smites him 
on the hip with a huge stone which he hurls at 
him. But here, as elsewhere, Aeneas is under 
the special care of the gods, and escapes the hu- 
miliation of defeat. His appearances are few and 
short, and invariably excite the interest of the 
gods. If Virgil had chosen a hero more promi- 
nent in the " Iliad," he would have exposed him- 
self to a dangerous comparison with Homer ; a 
less dignified hero would not have been a worthy 
ancestor of the Roman race. 

The "Aeneid" is addressed to patricians, — to 
the Trojugenae of Rome. Its most striking char- 
acteristic is the prevailing distinction of 

Distinction . r 

of tone in its tone. The poet seems always to 
have before his mind's eye the homes, 
the lives, the habits of the great and noble. A 
curious instance of this is afforded by VII. 579 if., 
where the frenzy of Amata's wanderings is illus- 
1 V. 299. 



SIMILES COMPARED WITH THE GREEK 141 

trated by the gyrations of a top whipped by boys 
" round great empty courts." The simile Virgil's 
— one of the few of which Virgil seems p^Pwith 1 " 
to have been the creator, not the bor- the Greek - 
rower — is far from happy, indeed is almost gro- 
tesque ; but it suggests that the scene of the boys' 
play is some great noble's palace. The same re- 
mark applies to another of his similes, — one which 
perhaps comes next to this in its far-fetched oddity, 
and which the poet borrowed from Apollonius Rho- 
dius. A ray of light reflected from a tub of water 
is by the Greek compared to the fluttering heart 
of Medea, by the Latin to the fluctuating mind of 
Aeneas. The allusion to the princely mansion is 
quite peculiar to the Latin poet ; there is not even 
a hint of it in the Greek : l — 

" And turns to every side his shifting thought : 
E'en as in brazen water-vats the beam 
Of trembling light reflected from the sun, 
Or radiant image of the silvery moon, 
Keeps ever flitting every place around, 
From wall to wall, and upward darting now 
Plays on the fretwork of the paneled roof." 

Here the poetry of the simile in the Greek poem 
has evaporated in the Virgilian reproduction of it. 
But conversely in the fine verses : 2 — 

;1 Through shadow the chieftain soon 
Dimly discerned her face, as a man, when the month is but 

young, 
Sees, or believes he has seen, amid cloudlets shining, the 
moon," — 

1 VIII. 21-25. 2 VI. 453. 



142 VIRGIL 



the whole poetical power of the passage consists 
in the application of the image to the sudden 
recognition by Aeneas of the pale and shadowy 
form of his forsaken love, dimly discerned through 
the gloom of the lower world. In the Greek 1 
nothing is denoted but the indistinctness with 
which Lynceus discerns the distant Heracles. So, 
too, in a fine passage 2 in the sixth book, Virgil 
breathes pure poetry into the verses of Apollo- 
nius Rhodius, which merely compare a concourse 
of people, " thick as leaves in Vallombrosa," 
to the forest foliage scattered by the breath of 
Autumn ; in Virgil, the withered leaves are the 
pale ghosts, and the frost is the chill touch of 
Death : — 

" Down to the bank of the river the streaming shadows re- 
pair. 
Mothers, and men. and the lifeless bodies of those who were 
Generous heroes, boys that are beardless, maidens unwed, 
Youths to the death-pile carried before their fathers were 

dead. 
Many as forest leaves that in autumn's earliest frost 
Flutter and fall, or as birds that in bevies flock to the coast 
Over the sea's deep hollows, when winter chilly and frore 
Drives them across far waters to land on a sunnier shore." 

Conington has on this passage a note of charac- 
teristic fineness of perception : " The well-known 
reversal of the comparison in Shelley's 'Ode to the 
West Wind,' where the ' leaves dead ' are compared 
to 'ghosts from the enchanter fleeing,' and desig- 
nated as 

1 Ap. R. IV. 1479. 2 VI. 309. 



THE TWO PARTS OF THE AENEID 1 43 

' Yellow and black and pale and hectic red 
Pestilence-stricken multitudes,' 

will illustrate what was in Virgil's mind." 

Was it this passage which suggested to Gabriel 
Dante Rossetti these lines of Shakespearean big- 
ness of conception and Tennysonian perfection of 
execution ? — 

" How then should sound upon life's darkening slope 
The ground-whirl of the perish'd leaves of Hope, 
The wind of Death's imperishable wing?" 

But I have already, perhaps, said more than 
enough on the general characteristics of „. 

& , & First six 

a poem which, more than any other great books of the 

, - . - Aeneid com- 

work of imagination in any language, pared with 
really depends for its interest rather on ast S1X " 
its episodes, and on the brilliancy of verses taken 
here and there apart from their context, than on 
our grasp of the poem as a whole. It is this 
feeling which has dictated the barren-seeming yet 
withal fascinating discussion as to the relative 
merits of the first six books of the " Aeneid " 
and the last six. It is at once apparent that the 
"Aeneid" falls into two halves, and that in the 
first we have an " Odyssey," and in the second 
an " Iliad." The one contains the adventures and 
wanderings of Aeneas till he reaches the mouth 
of the Tiber ; the other his struggles to win his way 
by the sword in the promised land. The first half 
has generally been greatly preferred. It has been 
held that, having gained the dizzy altitude of his 



144 VIRGIL 

midflight, it was inevitable that he should " stoop 
from his aery tour." The terrors of the siege of 
Troy, the adventures of the voyage which finally 
led him to Carthage, the passionate love-tale of 
which Carthage was the scene, the descent into 
Hell, — all this had beggared the resources of im- 
agination. Voltaire made himself the champion of 
this view, while Chateaubriand espoused the other 
side. The latter maintained that the most tender 
and impressive utterances of the poet are to be 
found in the last six books. Even if this were 
true, it would hardly prove his case ; but it seems 
to me that by far the larger number are to be 
found in the earlier books, which, moreover, are 
much more impressive and picturesque. There is 
no other female character in the poem which can 
compare with Dido in delicacy and vigor of portrait- 
ure ; and the second and third books hang like a 
gorgeous drop-scene before the tragedy enacted in 
the fourth. Yet, on the other hand, one can see 
that the poet's task was far harder when he left 
the scenes glorified by all the prismatic hues of 
Greek imagination, and turned to the yet unsung 
shores of Italy. Was he conscious of an inferi- 
ority in the execution of the latter portion of his 
work ? I think not. At the beginning of the 
seventh book, in invoking the Muse, he exclaims, — 

" A grander scene is opening on my view, 
A loftier chord I strike ; " l 

1 " Major rerum mihi nascitur ordo ; 
Majus opus moveo." 



FAMOUS PASSAGES IN VIRGIL 145 

and it is in a passage in the ninth book that he 
contemplates for Nisus and Euryalus an immortal- 
ity to be conferred by his poem : — 

" Blest pair ! if aught my verse avail, 
No day shall make your memory fail 

From off the heart of time, 
While Capitol abides in place 
The mansion of the Aeneid race, 
And throned upon that moveless base 

Rome's father sits sublime." 

Juvenal selects the description of Allecto in the 
seventh book as the highest specimen of Virgil's 
inspiration ; and Dante seems to have been most 
deeply moved by the closing scenes of the work 
when he speaks of Italy as the land — 

" Per cui morio la Vergine Cammilla 
Eurialo et Turno et Niso di ferute." 

The discussion to which I have referred suggests 
to me that it would be interesting here to advert to 
a few places in Virgil's poems which de- 

. . , r . . Famous 

rive a peculiar interest either from their passages in 
own perfect beauty or from some pleas- 
ing historical association. I do not desire to point 
to whole passages of sustained beauty or grandeur, 
but merely to put before your eyes a few of the 
jewels of Virgil which can best shine with little or 
no setting in the way of context. The poetry of 
Virgil lends itself to this kind of treatment. From 
the earliest times the literary merit of isolated pas- 
sages was a theme of discussion. Seneca 1 thought 
1 Ej>. 79. 5- 



146 VIRGIL 



that no human skill could surpass the description 
of Aetna in the third book, 1 while Aulus Gellius 2 
considered it too elaborate. Tennyson gave a 
crowning instance of his marvelous insight into 
the character and genius of Latin poetry when in 
the poem to Virgil he sang of 

" All the chosen coin of fancy flashing out from many a 
golden phrase," 

and again of 

" All the charm of all the Muses often flowering in a lonely 
word." 

Let us here consider a few of those golden phrases. 3 
Macaulay thought the finest passage in Virgil was 
that where a boy's love at first sight is told in the 
"Eclogues," VIII. 37-41 ; I give Sir C. Bowen's 
version of it, though it is hardly adequate : — 

" 'T was in our crofts I saw thee, a girl thy mother beside, 
Plucking the apples dewy, myself thy pilot and guide : 
Years I had numbered eleven, the twelfth was beginning to 

run : 
Scarce was I able to reach from the ground to the branches 

that snapp'd. 
Ah, when I saw how I perish'd ! to fatal folly was rapt ! " 

In this exquisite passage the most exquisite touch, 

" Scarce was I able to reach from the ground to the branches 
that snapp'd," 

1 III. 571. 2 XVII. 10. 

3 Many of these passages are brought together in a very 
eloquent and appreciative paper on Virgil by Mr. E. Myers, 
first published in the Fortnightly Review several years 
ago, and now included among his collected essays. 



FAMOUS PASSAGES IN VIRGIL 1 47 



is quite the poet's own. The rest is from The 
critus. We often see how Virgil can turn dross 
into gold, but here — greater marvel still — -we 
find him gilding the refined gold of the Greek 
poem, and in the process making it more lovely and 
precious. In a future lecture I shall put before 
you a certain verse from Statius, which I think is 
the worst verse in Latin poetry. Many would be 
disposed to quote as the best verse in Latin poetry 
Virgil's 

" Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt." 

It does, indeed, strike one with a sense of wondrous 
beauty and pathetic dignity. But I am not sure 
that all its meaning has yet been fully unfolded. 
Sir C. Bowen translates it, — 
" Tears are to human sorrow given, hearts feel for mankind." 

And such is the accepted view of the meaning of 
words which have always seemed to me to come 
bitter from that wellspring of sadness which made 
the poet marvel why the dead should desire to live 
again. It was this minor key in Virgil's poetry 
that was ringing in Tennyson's ears when he apos- 
trophized him so beautifully as 

" Thou majestic in thy sadness at the doubtful doom of 
humankind." 

Surely, in this famous verse, sunt lacrimae rerum, 
Virgil meant more than Wordsworth in the " La- 
odamia" when he wrote 

" But tears to human suffering are due." 



148 VIRGIL 



Surely these words, which seem full of a natural 
magic, come to us with a diviner air and a grander 
message than this. Dr. Henry, one of the very 
greatest of modern Virgilian scholars, has greatly 
added to the impressiveness of the verse by a re- 
fined and scholarly interpretation of the word rerum 
as meaning "in the world," just as in the phrase 
didcissime rerum. The meaning would then be, 
"There are such things as tears in the world," 
" tears are universal, belong to the constitution of 
nature, and the evils of mortality touch the heart." 
This is a great improvement on the ordinary expla- 
nation of this celebrated and oft-quoted verse. But 
may not the words, which cannot but strike one as 
fraught with some new and exquisite fancy, bear a 
meaning far more definite, weighty, and distin- 
guished ? Aeneas is gazing at the picture of the 
Trojan war in the temple of Juno in Carthage. As 
he looks he weeps, and cries, " E'en things inani- 
mate (res, the material picture) can weep for us, 
and the works of man's hands (mortalia) have 
their own pathetic power." That is, " Here in a 
strange land, where men knew me not till but yes- 
terday, I find a painted picture to accord me sym- 
pathy and call forth my tears." The verse which 
follows falls in with this view : — 

" Then on the lifeless painting he feeds his heart to his fill." l 

Inani, as Conington observes, is not a mere gen- 
eral epithet, but has a pathetic sense, implying 

1 " Sic ait atque animum pictura pascit inani." 



FAMOUS PASSAGES IN VIRGIL 1 49 

that the subjects of the picture are numbered 
with the lost and past. Rerum is the lonely word 
in which flowers all the charm of all the muses. 
I should acid that, in another passage in the 
"Aeneid," 1 mortalis means "the work of man's 
hands." 

There is one verse in the fourth book in which 
all the pathos of Dido's abandonment may be said 
to be concentrated. It is when she addresses 
Aeneas as hospes, " guest," and adds, — 
" Since Fate but that cold name allows 
To one whom once I call'd my spouse." 2 

Servius tells us that when Virgil was reading aloud 
the " Aeneid " to the emperor and his court, the 
poet's voice faltered as he pronounced those pa- 
thetic words. 

A natural magic touches another passage in the 
same book, which depicts the sense of utter 
loneliness which haunts the dreams of the de- 
serted queen. This is Sir. C. Bowen's rendering of 

it: — 

" In all her visions the fierce Aeneas appears, 
Hounding her ever to madness, and she seems left evermore 
Desolate, traveling always a long, lone journey with tears, 
Seeking her people of Tyre on a silent wilderness shore." 

Her lover is gone, and with him everything, — 
even her subjects, whom she has offended by giv- 
ing herself to a stranger. In her waking hours 
she never contemplates such a thing as abandon- 

1 XII. 740. 

2 " Hoc solum nomen quoniam de conjuge restat." 



1 50 VIRGIL 

merit by her subjects. Only her hopeless dreams 
present her to herself as deserted by him who was 
to her all the world, and therefore utterly alone. 
If Ilia's dream in Ennius at all suggested this 
exquisite passage, then Ennius has done at least 
one great thing. 

Perhaps the oftenest quoted passage in Virgil 

is — 

" Varium et mutabile semper 
Femina." 

It is curious that the translation of these very 
familiar words in Conington's prose version far 
surpasses in poetical color not only his own met- 
rical rendering, but also those of Sir C. Bowen 
and Canon Thornhill. "A thing of moods and 
fancies is a woman " admirably brings out the 
characteristic use of the neuter in the Latin, and 
is far more expressive than Conington's — 

" A woman's will 
Is changeful and uncertain still," : 

or Bowen's — 

"Woman is ever fickle and light," 

or Thornhill's — 

" A changeful thing at best, 
From love to hate soon shifts a woman's heart." 

The perfect description of the dying Dido ends 
with an immortal line, — 

" Quaesivit caelo lucem, ingemuitque reperta." 



FAMOUS PASSAGES IN VIRGIL 151 

Here is Sir C. Bowen's version of the scene : — 

" Thrice on her couch with an effort she raised her ; pillowed 
her head 
Thrice on the elbow beneath her, and thrice fell back on the 

bed. 
Upwards she lifted her wandering gaze, and above and 

around 
Sought in the heavens for the light, and groaned when light 
she had found." 

She groaned, the sight of the light bringing back 
vividly to her mind the troubles she had endured 
in it. So rapidly does the poet pass from point 
to point that the reader is left to make out for 
himself the delicate connections. Tired and dis- 
gusted with the world as Dido is, she cannot die 
without taking a last look at the light in which she 
had once been so happy. But the sight of the 
light serves only to bring back with increased dis- 
tinctness the recollection of her misery, and with 
a deep groan she closes her eyes again and dies. 
It is the dying human being who 

"Upwards lifted her wandering gaze, and above and 
around 
Sought in the heavens for the light." 

It is the woman> Dido, deserted and betrayed, who 
" groaned when light she had found." 

" There is no so touching word," writes Dr. 
Henry, " in the whole ' Aeneid ' as this one word 
ingemuit, groaned, placing as it does before the 
mind capable of such sympathies the whole heart- 



152 VIRGIL 

rending history in a single retrospective glance. 
Show me anything at all like it in the ' Iliad.' " 

Another famous verse introduces us again to the 
scene when Virgil read his poem to the court. We 
are told that he read with "a magic fascination," 
lenoci7iiis miris. Augustus and Octavia burst into 
tears when he came to the words, — 

" Child of a nation's sorrow ! If thou canst baffle the Fates' 
Bitter decrees, and break for a while their barrier gates, 
Thine to become Marcellus." l 

I have already quoted the verse — 

" And trembling mothers caught their children to their 
breasts." 2 

It is adapted from Apollonius Rhodius, but the 
Greek poet takes three verses to express the idea, 
and then only says that the mothers embraced 
their children. \n pressere, " caught them to their 
breasts," we have again the charm flowering in a 
single word. 

Fenelon could not read or repeat without tears 
those high and dignified words in which Evander 
welcomes Aeneas to his rustic palace : — 

" Dare thou as nobly too, my honor'd guest, 
To spurn at pomp, and, rivaling the God, 
Set in thy foot, nor scorn our poor estate." 8 

1 " Heu miserande puer, si qua fata aspera rumpas, 

Tu Marcellus eris." — VI. 883. 

2 " Et trepidae matres pressere ad pectora natos." 

VII. 518. 

3 " Aude hospes contemn ere opes et te quoque dignum 

Finge Deo, rebusque veni non asper egenis." 



DEFECTS OF THE AENEID 1 53 

Dryden writes of this passage : " For my part I 
am lost in the admiration of it. I contemn the 
world when I think of it, and myself when I 
translate it." 

Having dwelt at some length on certain pas- 
sages in the " Aeneid " which have most deeply 
moved mankind through the successive genera- 
tions, one feels that this is perhaps the fitting 
time to point to some of its defects. I would say 
at once that the fifth book is all bad. Not only is 
it an excrescence on the natural body of the poem, 
but it contains the worst examples of Virgil's slav- 
ish adherence to the text of Homer. There is in 
it, too, some very un-Virgilian coarseness. Me- 
noetes sitting on the rock, and discharging from 
his stomach the salt water which he has swallowed, 
is a disgusting picture ; the prayer of Cloanthus 
to the sea-gods is worthy only of burlesque ; in- 
deed, the book has scarcely a redeeming feature. 
Next in order of demerit comes the tenth with its 
endless battle - scenes, which were evidently as 
wearying to the writer as they are to the reader. 
Doubtless this is the reason why we find Virgil's 
mechanical execution to be at its worst in this 
book. The task was uncongenial, and the words 
and numbers refused to flow. ' Probably the fee- 
blest verse in Virgil is — as Mr. Myers observes — 

" Sed non et Troius heros 
Dicta parat contra, jaculum nam torquet in hostem ; " * 

1 " But not the Trojan hero, too, essays 

A speech ; for at the foe his lance he hurls." 



154 VIRGIL 



a verse which suggests a modern exercise painfully 
achieved by a schoolboy and inspired by a gradus. 

The tenth book, however, has fine passages, and, 
so far as it is an evil, it is a necessary evil, for 
battle-scenes are, we may suppose, de rigueur in an 
epic poem. But the fifth might have been omitted 
with great advantage, and Varius and Tucca would 
have consulted their friend's reputation if they had 
excised it. It has passages which are inconsistent 
with the rest of the poem. To take only one, 
Nisus and Euryalus appear in the fifth book, yet 
in the ninth they are introduced as if for the first 
time. The fifth book was certainly an after- 
thought, and was probably constructed with a view 
to impart a certain symmetry to the whole work. 
When one thinks of the very uncharacteristic in- 
stances of bad taste which it supplies, and of its 
inconsistency in some places with confessedly 
authentic parts of the poem, one is tempted to 
hazard a conjecture that Virgil left behind him 
only eleven books, and that Varius and Tucca 
wrote or procured another book to raise the num- 
ber to twelve. 

Virgil is essentially a religious poet, The fourth 
Virgil a re- Eclogue has been held to derive its inspi- 
ligious poet. ra tion frdm the expectation of a coming 
Messiah. But, however that may be, the child 
shadowed forth as the king of the peaceful world is 
essentially the product of a deeply religious spirit. 
The motto of the Georgics might well be said to be 
Ora et lab ova; and the "Aeneid " is above all things 



A RELIGIOUS POET 1 55 

a religious poem. This, indeed, largely accounts 
for what is unheroic in the character of Aeneas. 
Evander is perhaps the most pleasing as he is cer- 
tainly the most characteristic of Virgil's creations. 
He is a perfect example of a good old man of the 
good old type. Virgil might be described, as Dante 
'has been described, as a " theologian to whom no 
dogma was foreign" {theologies nullius dogmatis 
expers). The duty of Aeneas is to bring the gods 
into Italy : the glory of the victory may fall to Lati- 
nus ; his own aim is to fulfill his destiny. From 
this point of view Gaston Boissier selects, as the 
verse which unfolds the whole plan of the " Aeneid," 
a line in the twelfth book (192), — 

" The gods and worship I shall claim to give ; 
Let sire Latinus bear the sword of war." l 

The real defect in the character of Aeneas, from 
the point of view of art, is that it occasionally slips 
into the Homeric mould. On the side of Turnus 
are the bolder spirits, and the characters drawn 
with a freer hand. Of these Mezentius is the 
most daring. But even here the religious spirit 
is present. When the body of his son is brought 
in, what is the instinctive gesture of this athe- 
ist prince, this cont emptor divum ? He raises his 
hands to heaven. 2 Whenever Virgil recounts any 
incident of a barbarous type, such as the murder 
of Misenus by Triton through jealousy, or when 

1 " Sacra deosque dabo : socer arma Latinus habeto." 

2 Aeneid, X. 845. 



1 56 VIRGIL 



he records a very crude tradition, like the transfor- 
mation of the galleys into goddesses of the sea, he 
adds some such phrase as, " if we can believe it," 
or, " I tell an old tale as 'twas told to me ; " and 
he cannot suppress an exclamation of astonishment 
at the vindictive temper of Juno, — 

" Can wrath so dire abide in heavenly minds? ,n 1 

The religious aspect of Virgil naturally leads us 
up to the strange circumstance, already mentioned, 
Virgil as a tnat tne Middle Ages glorified Virgil into 
saint, a sa i n t and degraded him into a wizard. 

He was placed among the Prophets in the Cathe- 
dral of Zamorra, and invoked as Prophet of the 
Gentiles in Limoges and Rheims. The rubric of 
Rouen directed that on Christmas Day the priest 
should say, — 

" Maro, Maro, Vates Gentilium 
Da Christo testimonium," 

to which Virgilius was to reply, — 

" Ecce polo demissa solo nova progenies est." 

I have already referred to the mediaeval romance 
and as a which couples Aristotle and Virgil as 
magician. magicians. Gower, in his "Confessio 
Amantis," tells us how Virgil 

" A mirrour made of his clergie 2 
And set it in the townes eyes 
Of marbre on a pillar without," 

1 " Tantaene animis caelestibus irae ? " 

2 Learning, skill. 



A SAINT AND A MAGICIAN 1 57 

that the Romans might behold if there were any 
enemies within thirty miles. But by far the most 
interesting account of Virgil as a magician is to 
be found in a very rare romance, of which an 
English version was printed at Antwerp in 1510, 
under the title : " This boke treateth of the lyfe 
of Virgilius, and of his deth, and many marvayles 
that he did in his lyfe tyme by whychcraft and 
nygromancie thorowgh the helpe of the devylls of 
hell." 1 We read in the second chapter of this ro- 
mance how " the son of Remus, that was also 
named Remus, slewe his unkell Romulus, and was 
made emperoure, and so reyned emperoure." In 
his reign Virgil was born. His mother was " one 
of the greatest senyatours dawghters of Rome, 
and hyghest of lynage." When Virgil was at 
school in Toledo, he was initiated into the secrets 
of necromancy in a way which reminds us of a 
well-known tale in the " Arabian Nights." " One 
day when the schollers had lycence to go play and 
sporte them in the fyldes after the usaunce of the 
olde tyme, he spyed a great hole in the syde of a 
great hylle." Going into this hole, he wandered 
on till he saw " a lytell bourde marked with a 
word," and heard a voice calling him, which said, 
" I am a devyll conjured out of the bodye of a cer- 
tayne man, and banysshed till the day of judemend, 
without that I be delivered by the handes of men." 
Virgil agreed to release the devil if he would show 

1 Sir Walter Scott made copious extracts from this ro- 
mance in the notes to the Lay of the Last Minstrel. 



158 VIRGIL 



him how to get the " bokes of nygromancy" that 
he possessed. The devil consented, whereupon — ■ 

" Virgilius pulled open the bourde, and there was a lytell 
hole, and thereat wrange the devyll out like a yeel, and cam 
and stood byfore Virgilius lyke a bygge man. Thereof Vir- 
gilius was a stoned, and merveyled greatly thereof that so 
great a man myght come out at so lytell a hole. Than sayd 
Virgilius, Shulde ye well passe into the hole that ye cam out 
of ? Yea, I shall well, sayd the devyll. Than said Virgilius, 
I hold ye the best plegge I have that ye shall not do it. 
Well, sayd the devyll, thereto I consente. And than the 
devyll wrange hymself e into the lytell hole ageyn ; and as he 
was there in, Virgilius kyvered the hole ageyn with the bourde 
close, and so was the devyll begyled, and myght nat there 
com out ageyn, but there abydeth shutte styll therin. Than 
called the devyll dredfully to Virgilius, and sayd, What have 
ye done ? Virgilius answered, Abyde there styll to your day 
apoynted. And fro thensforth abydeth he there. And so 
Virgilius becam very connynge in the practyse of the black 
scyence." 

When he came to be old, Virgil resolved to re- 
new his youth by his magic arts. So he took with 
him a trusted man to a " castell that was without 
the towne," the entrance to which was guarded by 
" coper men with flayles in their handes sore smy- 
tinge." Then he ordered his man to slay him, and 
hew him in pieces, and salt him in a barrel under 
" a lampe, that nyghte and day therin may droppe 
and leke, and thou shalt ix days longe fylle the 
lampe and fayl not ; and whan this is all done, 
than shall I be renued and made yonge ageyn." 
After much persuasion the trusty servant was pre- 
vailed on to execute his master's will. When seven 



SADNESS OF LATIN POETRY 1 59 

days had elapsed, the emperor missed his counselor, 
and finally frightened the trusty man into guiding 
him to the place where the body of Virgil was : — 

"And whan they cam afore the castell and wold enter 
they myght nat because the flayles smyt so faste. Than sayd 
the emperoure, Mak cease this flayles that we may cum in. 
Than answered the man, I know nat the way. Than sayd 
the emperoure, Then shalt thou die. And than thorowgh 
the fere of dethe he turned the vyce and made the flayles 
stande styll, and than the emperoure entered into the castell 
with all his folke, and sowghte about in every corner after 
Virgilius ; and at the laste they sowghte so longe that they 
cam into the seller where they saw the lampe hang over the 
barrill where Virgilius lay in, deed. Than asked the empe- 
roure the man, Who had made him so herdy to put his mays- 
ter Virgilius so to dethe ; and the man answered no word to 
the emperoure. And than the emperoure with great anger 
drew out his swerde and slewe he than Virgilius's man. And 
whan all this was done than sawe the emperoure and all his 
folke a naked chylde iij tymes rennynge about the barrill 
saying the words : Cursed be the tyme that ye cam ever here. 
And with these words vanyshed the chylde away, and was 
never sene ageyn ; and thus abyd Virgilius in the barril deed." 

The great Latin poets are all profoundly sad. 
Catullus, Lucretius, and Virgil look on life as a 
place — 

" where men sit and hear each other groan." 

The Greek epic now and then strikes a chord in 
a minor key with that exquisite truth and fullness 
which it achieves without an effort, as in — 

" Even as the leaves, such is the race of men ; " 1 

1 dlr} irep (p-uXXwv yeueri, Toi^Se Ka\ avdpwu. 

Iliad, VI. 146. 



160 VIRGIL 



Or 
Or 



" The fates have given to man a patient mind ; " l 



What boots the storm of wailing, for the gods 



Thus have ordain'd for mortals, that poor man 
Should live in woe, but gods know nought of grief ! " 2 

But the melancholy is but for a moment, and gives 
way at once to the joy of life, of triumph, even of 
revenge ; if there is a bitterness it arises from a 
Sadness of fountain of mirth : but the sadness of the 
Latin poetry. L a tln poets is abiding. Virgil marvels 
why the dead should desire to live again : 3 — 

" O my father ! and are there, and must we believe it, he 

said, 
Spirits that fly once more to the sunlight back from the 

dead ? 
Souls that anew to the body return and the fetters of clay ? 
Can there be any who long for the light thus blindly as 

they ? " 

When Odysseus seeks to console the dead Achil- 
les with the thought that he is a great prince among 
the dead, Achilles answers him and says : 4 — 

" Nay, speak not comfortably to me of death, great Odys- 
seus. Rather would I live upon the soil as the hireling of 

1 r\7]rbu yap Mo?pai Bvjxbv deaav avBpwiroicriv. 

Iliad, XXIV. 49. 

2 ov yap Tis -rrpri^is ireAerai KpvepoTo yooio. 

&s yap iirsnX&aavTO deol SeiAoTffi fiporoTcriv, 
£weiv axw/jievois. avrol Se t d/c?7§ses eiaiv. 

Iliad, XXIV. 524-6. 

. 3 Aeneid, VI. 721. 

4 Odyssey, XI. 488, Butcher and Lang's translation. 



HIS ENDURING DOMINION l6l 

another, with a landless man who had no great livelihood, 
than bear sway among all the dead that are no more." 

All the great Latin poets died young ; neither 
Catullus nor Lucretius reached middle age, and 
Virgil had barely passed it. He had attained the 
age at which two other great poets died, who per- 
haps might best be linked with Virgil, at least 
as regards the immediate and enduring dominion 
which they acquired over the highest minds in 
their own and subsequent ages, — the Athenian 
Menander and our own Shakespeare. To the Eng- 
lishman and the American especially, who, follow- 
ing a precedent already well established in the time 
of Seneca, Petronius, and Juvenal, have made Vir- 
gil a text-book in every school, his poetry comes 
appareled in the "celestial light" which illumines 
the morning of life. Like "the smell of violets 
hidden in the green," it — 

" Pours back into his empty soul and frame 
The times when he remembers to have been 
Joyful and free from blame." 

A graceful eulogist of Virgil has spoken of — 

" the silent spells 
Held in those haunted syllables." 

It is by the ghost of our childhood that they are 
haunted, and the echoes of the old school quad- 
rangle and the class-room, where we conned our 
daily task. At a verse from the " Aeneid," the 
sun goes back for us on the dial ; our boyhood is 
recreated, and returns to us for a moment like a 
visitant from a happy dreamland. 



VI. 

HORACE. 

When we come to Horace we come face to face 
with that one of all the classical writers, in either 
prose or poetry, who may be said to have 
tive neglect endeared himself most to the modern 
in his own world, and perhaps especially to the 
English-speaking portion of it. Virgil 
and Horace in this respect present to us a some- 
what singular contrast. We have seen that the 
fame of Virgil was at once assured, even before 
the appearance of his greatest poem ; that his con- 
temporaries and his immediate successors regarded 
him with the highest admiration and pride ; that no 
one dared to raise his voice against the universal 
acclaim till Niebuhr, in the beginning of this cen- 
tury, made invidious comparisons between him and 
Homer ; and that since that time opinions about 
his place in poetry have been to some extent di- 
vided. It is altogether otherwise with Horace. 
Horace was no doubt admired by Augustus, Mae- 
cenas, and Pollio. In a subsequent age Petronius 
Arbiter credited him with " a subtle happiness " 
of expression {curiosa felicitas) ; and Persius said 
of him that his satiric touch is so light that his 
victims smile under his lash, that he wins his way 
into their very hearts, and there disports himself. 



NEGLECTED IN HIS OWN TIME 1 63 

But we do not find that the critics of his own time 
admitted him to that sacred Valhalla of Roman 
poets of which Virgil was the acknowledged king. 
Ovid calls him numerosus, or musical (Trist. IV. 
8. 49) ; but in another passage (Art. Am. III. 333) 
in which he enumerates and rapidly character- 
izes the great Latin poets, Virgil, Tibullus, Proper- 
tius, Gallus, Varro, we have not a word of Horace. 
Velleius recognizes Catullus, Tibullus, Virgil, Ovid, 
but never mentions Horace. Quintilian's estimate 
of him is but moderate : " Of lyricists Horace is, 
perhaps, the only one worth reading. He occa- 
sionally shows elevation (insurgit aliquando), has 
plenty of sweetness and grace, and is most happily 
daring in figures and expressions. If any dead 
poet be coupled with him, it must be the late Cae- 
sius Bassus. But there are living lyricists far 
greater than Bassus." If Quintilian thought it a 
question whether Caesius Bassus, the friend and 
editor of Persius, did not deserve to be placed be- 
side Horace, while declaring that there were many 
living lyricists far superior to Bassus, we can hardly 
see how the end of the judgment can be under- 
stood except as a qualification of the beginning. 
Indeed, to say of a lyric poet that he occasionally 
rises is certainly to damn him with faint praise. I 
doubt if there is a single recognition of Horace as 
a Roman poet, and not merely a skillful versifier, 
before the time of Fronto, who, writing to Marcus 
Aurelius, calls him a memorabilis poeta ; and un- 
fortunately memorabilis may mean " worthy of men- 



1 64 HORACE 



tion" as well as "distinguished," while there is no- 
thing in the rest of the judgment to tell us in what 
sense Fronto wished the epithet to be understood. 
At all events the words are not such as would be 
used of a poet who had long won securely his niche 
in the temple of fame. 

But to the modern world, down to this very 
His great date, Horace is almost an idol. He has 
STmodern forged a link of union between intel- 
times. lects so diverse as those of Dante, Mon- 

taigne, Bossuet, Lafontaine, and Voltaire, Hooker, 
Chesterfield, Gibbon, Wordsworth, and Thackeray. 
Mystic and atheist, scoffer and preacher, recluse 
and leader of fashion have in Horace one sub- 
ject on which they are sympathetic with each 
other. Gibbon never traveled without a copy of 
his poems in his pocket ; Hooker fled with his 
Horace to the fields from the reproaches of a rail- 
ing wife ; Thackeray is content if his hero, the 
future man of the world, has enough Latin on leav- 
ing school " to quote Horace respectably through 
life." Indeed, a certain modicum of Horace is 
often the remnant of classic lore that the average 
Englishman and Irishman care to carry with them 
into the arena of active life. A fancied slight to 
the memory of Horace is resented in England as a 
personal insult, and a visit to Italy is nothing unless 
you have done your duty to the shrine of the poet. 
The letter of a correspondent in Milman's " Life of 
Horace " tells us that at the present day English 
travelers visit the site of the Sabine farm in such 



POPULAR IN MODERN TIMES 1 65 

numbers, and trace its features with such enthusi- 
asm, that the resident peasantry believe Horace to 
have been an Englishman, not being able to con- 
ceive any source of interest but compatriotism in 
one so long dead, and nowhere to be found in the 
calendar of saints. In an article which appeared 
in the " Quarterly Review," some time ago, I put 
forward some views about the relation of Horace to 
his predecessors, and his sincerity as a love-poet, 
which evoked in the London press several letters 
from country gentlemen and others, who did not 
even affect for the moment to discuss the truth of 
the opinions propounded, but heaped abuse on the 
writer of the article, who was, fortunately for him- 
self, anonymous. 

As I propose in this lecture to lay before you 
some of these views, which I hold to be true, and 
which I believe will be more interest- 

The sources 

ing to you than a more orthodox treat- of his attrac- 
ment of the subject might be, I would 
ask leave first to declare my belief that we owe 
to Horace a precious store of pointed aphorisms 
and shrewd comments on life, which, apart from 
all controversies about his place in poetry, must 
ever establish a kind of personal relation with his 
reader, and must have a permanent (perhaps an 
increasing) value for the world. His odes, more- 
over, as regards diction and metrification, are a 
marvelously successful, experiment. Whatever may 
be thought about the meaning which underlies 
them, their form is perfection itself, and they defy 



1 66 HORACE 



imitation. No attempt to reproduce their effect 
in Latin or in any other language has met with 
even a moderate measure of success. Since Sta- 
tius so completely failed to revive in his " Silvae " 
the Horatian Sapphic and Alcaic, each new at- 
tempt to copy them has only added a new proof 
that the mould in which they were made was shat- 
tered beyond all mending when it fell from the 
hands of Horace. 

We will now venture to approach some of those 
questions which modern Horatiolatry regards as 
blasphemous. I will confine myself in the main to 
points on which I conceive the existing evidence 
to have been to some extent overlooked or misap- 
prehended. 

" Horace," writes an excellent critic, the late Pro- 
fessor Sellar, in the " Encyclopaedia Bri- 

Professor . .... J . . 

Sellar on tannica, " establishes a personal relation 
with his reader, speaks to him as a personal 
friend, tells the story of his life ; " and again : — 

" From his Satires, which deal chiefly with the 
manners and outward lives of men, we know him in 
his relations to society and his ordinary moods ; from 
his Epistles, which deal more with the inner life, 
we best understand his deepest convictions and 
the practical side of his philosophy ; while his Odes 
have perpetuated the finest pleasure which he de- 
rived from art, nature, and the intercourse of life." 

Are his writings really the artless and candid 
expression of his personal feelings and experi- 
ences ? I think the answer to that question should 



RELATION TO HIS PREDECESSORS 1 67 

not be as unqualified as that given by Professor 
Sellar and the great majority of modern 
critics. While I recognize as just in the Horace to- 
main the words in which the scholars of predeces- 
to-day broadly characterize the work of S01S " 
Horace, I cannot help feeling that there are some 
aspects of the question which have been almost 
entirely neglected. One of these is the relation of 
the poet towards his predecessors, and especially 
Lucilius. I think you will agree with me that the 
facts which I will put forward show that from this 
point of view the estimate of the nature of Horace's 
work must be considerably modified. 1 

Horace, like all the poets of his time, con- 
ceived it to be the function of his art either to 
reproduce in Latin the masterpieces of Greek lit- 
erature, or to adapt to the taste of his own age 
the old poets of his own land. When he went to 
school at Rome, Orbilius, that ancient dominie 
whom the fame of his pupil has immortalized, 
made him learn Homer in the original Greek, and 
the translation of the " Odyssey " into Latin Satur- 
nian verse by his fellow-countryman, Livius Andro- 
nicus. The course of the schoolboy's studies pre- 
figured the two careers open to the man's literary 
aspirations. Horace might attempt either to re- 
produce for his Latin readers the poetry of Hellas, 
or to set in a modern and more musical key the 
rough notes already uttered by the Calabrian Muse. 

1 The references to Lucilius are to the edition of his frag- 
ments by L. M tiller, Leipsic, 1872. 



1 68 HORACE 



He did both, and fortunately for us he made a wise 
choice in adopting his models in both cases. In 
the one, instead of addressing: himself to Callima- 
chus, Euphorion, and the Alexandrine school, 
which so fascinated Catullus, Propertius, and even 
Virgil, he went back in his Odes to the well-head 
of Greek poetry, to Alcaeus, Alcman, and Archi- 
lochus ; in the other, he left Naevius and Livius to 
be thumbed by schoolboys in their native uncouth- 
ness, and turned his attention to the polishing of 
the rude satire of Lucilius, in which he rightly de- 
tected an affinity to the Old Comedy which was 
the crowning glory of the Attic stage. He found 
in the Satires of Lucilius not only a rough-hewn 
commentary on life and manners, but even literary 
criticism, and easy-going descriptions of every-day 
events, which only required some polishing and 
refining to make them thoroughly acceptable to 
the court of Augustus and the salon of Maecenas. 
In fact, Horace seems to have done for 

Horace com- 
pared with Lucilius very much what Pope did for the 

coarse tales of Chaucer, for the rough 
philosophizing of Dr. Donne, and even for the Epis- 
tles of Horace himself. In the descriptive pieces 
especially we recognize in the Latin satirist the 
same art which enabled his English imitator to re- 
commend Chaucer's tale of January and May to the 
more refined susceptibilities of the court of Queen 
Anne. Pope saw that some of the tales of Chaucer 
were of such a character that they could be made 
very pleasing and interesting to the court, but 



COMPARED WITH POPE 1 69 

that their almost unintelligible archaism as well as 
their coarseness of treatment would prevent their 
ever being much read in their original form. He 
accordingly wove out of the strong homespun of 
Chaucer and the frigid classicality of the eigh- 
teenth century a kind of showy stuff that suited 
well the 

" Teacup times of hood and hoop, 
And when the patch was worn." 

Lucilius had merits and defects very similar to 
those found in Chaucer by Pope. He 

J Merits and 

affords us instances of ruggedness and defects of 
originality unique among the Roman 
poets. The fragments which time has spared to 
us certainly hardly bear the traces of that intellect- 
ual culture and moral breadth which are ascribed 
to him by the voice of antiquity. But we must 
remember that the Lucilian fragments have come 
down to us only to illustrate irregularities of dic- 
tion and idiom, and they must have had excellent 
qualities : else how are we to account for the high 
estimate of them formed by Cicero, Juvenal, Taci- 
tus, Quintilian, and Horace ? 

In his moral essays Horace seems to have used 
Lucilius in the same way as he himself How used 
and the English satirist Donne were h ? Horace - 
afterwards used by Pope ; while in his descriptive 
pieces Horace treated Lucilius as Pope treated 
Chaucer. When Pope makes George I. figure in 
his verses as Augustus, we feel that he is doing 
what no Englishman would have done, unless he 



170 HORACE 



were trying to accommodate Horace to his own 
time. When he writes, — 

" Our wives read Milton and our daughters plays," 

he is not describing his own times, but giving 
a modernized version of Horace, in which Au- 
gustus appears as George I. and Homer as Mil- 
ton. Similarly we find that when Horace refers 
to the typical gladiator he uses the name of 
Pacideianus, the gladiator in Lucilius, whom (were 
he not engaged in a restoration of Lucilius) he 
would no more have thought of mentioning than a 
writer of a generation ago would have thought of 
naming Mendoza instead of Tom Sayers as the 
typical prize-fighter of his time. 

Now and then we come on fragments of Lucil- 
ius showing clear traces of a narrative which ran 
parallel with that of Horace ; and in these cases 
we see that the difference between the two is to be 
found just in the absence of those defects which 
Horace points out as the salient blots on the style 
of the old poet, — roughness of structure and dic- 
tion, prolixity, and immoderate use of Greek words 
and phrases. Confirmation of this will be found 
in many of the passages which we shall compare, 
but it may be instructive here to adduce one clear 
instance of the correction, in the Horatian re- 
storation, of each of these faults in the Lucilian 
original. 

In a well-known passage Horace is inculcat- 
ing that duty of moderating one's desires which 



HOW HORACE USED LUC I LI US 17 1 

he so often preaches. He ends with the re- 
mark : 1 — 

" Say you've a million quarters on your floor: 
Your stomach is like mine : it holds no more." 

(In my quotations from the Satires and Epistles I 
nearly always give the excellent version of Coning- 
ton.) Quite similar is the argument as well as 
the illustration in a fragment of Lucilius, 2 but the 
concluding words corresponding to " you can't eat 
more than I " are " aeque fruniscor ego ac tu," 
where fruniscor is an old form of fruor only to be 
found in ante-classical Latin. 

As a specimen of the prolixity of the old poet 
we may refer to a fragment preserved by Porphy- 
rion on Epist. I. 1. 73, where Horace refers very 
briefly to a well-known apologue : — 

" I '11 give the fox's answer to the lion : 
' I 'm frightened at those footsteps ; every track 
Leads to your home, but ne'er a one leads back.' " 

In the Lucilian fragment 3 we have evidence that 
the condition and looks of the lion were described, 
and the perverse impulse which made the fox 
approach the den, and then there was a regular 
dialogue between the two beasts. 

The tendency to use Greek expressions, when 
Latin would have served the purpose just as well, 
would receive illustration from most of the paral- 
lel passages in the two writers, but one will serve, 

1 Sat I. 1. 45, 46. 2 XVIII. 3. 3 XXX. 80-87. 



172 HORACE 



The familiar phrase, " sic me servavit Apollo," 1 
which concludes the episode of the bore encoun- 
tered on the Sacred Way, no doubt had its origin 

in the Llicilian rbv S ? igqpiraZa' 'AiroWwv. 

Before entering further into the question what 
may be inferred from Lucilian echoes in 

Source of J 

Lucilian Horace, it will be necessary to remind 
you of the way in which these fragments 
have come down to us. They have not been pre- 
served by the reverent hands of collectors of liter- 
ary gems or pregnant aphorisms. They have been 
handed down by grammarians who wished to pro- 
vide their rules with examples and exceptions. The 
old poets were used by them chiefly to illustrate 
irregularities of expression, and it is quite possible 
that this circumstance has led us to form an exag- 
gerated conception of the roughness and uncouth- 
ness of early Latin poetry. Except a few verses 
quoted here and there by literary men of the world 
like Cicero and Ouintilian, we owe our knowledge 
of Lucilius entirely to grammarians who wished 
to illustrate an unusual gender, such as palumbcs 
masculine, a singular usage, as rictus applied to 
human beings, or rare forms, like manducari (depo- 
nent) and contest for comedit. It is to a passage 
preserved by Nonius 2 to illustrate the last two 
Probable forms that we owe a fragment which 



orfSnof seems to show that the bore whom 

Sat. i. 9. Horace met on the Sacred Way, far 

from being Propertius, as a French critic main- 

1 Sat. \.%fin. 2 XXIII. 15. 



A LUCILIAN BORE RECHAUFFE 1 73 

tained, had no objective Existence for Horace at 
all, but was only a Lucilian bore re'chauffe. The 
fragment is, 1 — 

" Surprising his victim, in closest embrace 
He enfolds him, and browses all over his face," — 

words which seem plainly to point to the importu- 
nate effusiveness of one who would fain claim a far 
closer intimacy than really existed ; the more 
clearly when we remember that the Satire begins 
with words found together in Lucilius — ibat forte 
is quoted from him by Nonius — and ends with 
words which we meet in Lucilius in their Greek 
dress. 

By a similar chance the surviving fragments of 
Lucilius present us here and there with 

The journey 

expressions which make it seem highly to Brundi- 
probable that the celebrated account of 
the journey to Brundisium — though no doubt the 
journey was actually made by Horace in the com- 
pany of Maecenas — is not a genuine record of 
adventures which they actually met, but rather a 
polished version of a piece in which Lucilius gave 
a versified account of a journey from Rome to 
Capua, and thence to the Straits of Messina. The 
fragments have come to us solely from the gram- 
marians, and nothing but the chance that they 
contained some anomaly of diction or usage has 

1 " Adsequitur neque opinantem, in caput insilit, ipsum - 
Commanducatur totum complexu' comestque." 

Frag. IV. 42. 



174 HORACE 



preserved them for us. They are, in my opinion, 
enough to show that Horace took his idea of 
writing a metrical itinerary from a similar per- 
formance on the part of the older poet, and intro- 
duced from it into his own account incidents which 
are hardly likely to have occurred to two indepen- 
dent travelers. Two different journeys might of 
course have many features in common ; but some 
coincidences are so minute that we cannot but be- 
lieve that the later narrative adopted them from the 
earlier. To begin with, the same criticism on the 
state of the roads is to be found in both, except 
that the old poet describes their condition as labo- 
sum} and the later, characteristically avoiding the 
archaism, as factum corruptius imbre, — 

" Made worse than ever b) T the recent rains." 

Then, some quarrel or semi-humorous exchange 
of scurrilities, like that between Sarmentus and 
Messius Cicirrhus, is clearly indicated in Lucilius ; 
but while Sarmentus compared his adversary to a 
wild horse, the Lucilian scurra describes 2 his oppo- 
nent more violently as a 

" Buck-tooth'd Bovillan with projecting tusk, — 
An Aethiop rhinoceros/' 

Of the " many retorts " of Cicirrhus lightly dis- 
missed by Horace, there seem to have been some 
on the part of his Lucilian prototype which would 
much better have been suppressed ; but he, as well 

1 III. io. 2 III. 8. 



THE JOURNEY TO BRUNDISIUM 1 75 

as Cicirrhus, concluded with an allusion to the 
meagre and puny figure of his adversary, much 
more violent, however, in its expression, for " so 
meagre and diminutive " 1 is the modified Hora- 
tian form of the vigorous Lucilian phrase, — 

" A dead-alive sketch of an atomy." 2 

To make assurance double sure, an incident men- 
tioned in the 85th verse of Horace's Satire (I. 5) 
had its counterpart in Lucilius (III. 55), as we learn 
from a note of Porphyrion on Sat. I. 6. 22, tell- 
ing us that in old times skins of beasts were used 
as bedclothes. Finally, we have in the Lucilian 
itinerary gritty bread, a town not to be expressed in 
a hexameter verse, and macros palumbes correspond- 
ing to the macros turdos of Horace. Surely Horace 
took in hand the narrative of Lucilius, and, in de- 
scribing a similar journey made by himself, intro- 
duced into it whatever incidents he found amusing 
in the old poem, toning down roughness and archa- 
ism of expression, pruning redundancy, and omit- 
ting the coarsest details. Gibbon, in reference to 
some of the episodes in this particular piece, asks, 
not unnaturally, how could any man of taste reflect 
on them the day after ? We may further feel a dif- 
ficulty in the fact that, when Maecenas was going 
on a mission of haute politique, he took no one 
with him but literary men little conversant with 
politics, and buffoons like Sarmentus and Cicirrhus. 

1 " Gracili tarn tamque pusillo." — Sat. I. 5. 69. 

2 "Vix vivo homini ac monogrammo.'' — II. 20. 



176 HORACE 



It would seem that these difficulties may fairly 
be met by the theory that the trivial — sometimes 
far from pleasing — incidents of the journey are 
merely survivals from the Lucilian poem, which 
Horace felt bound to introduce into his own with 
somewhat less startling realism, and that he omit- 
ted such actual circumstances of the tour and per- 
sons of the entourage as did not fall conveniently 
into the Lucilian framework. 

In the dinner of Nasidienus did Horace describe 
, ,. an entertainment at which he was actu- 

The dinner 

of Nasi- ally present, or did he merely refurbish a 
Lucilian account of a similar occasion ? 
Horace, no doubt, may have been the guest of a 
rich and vulgar parvenu, but, if he was, so was Lu- 
cilius ; and the Lucilian host, like the Horatian, 
rubbed the table with a purple cloth (gansape p7ir- 
pnred), praised the fare which he had provided, 
claimed the honors of a discoverer in the science 
of gastronomy, and lectured his guests on the in- 
fluence of the moon on articles of food. Moreover, 
as Horace and his fellow-guests found the dishes 
to have a strange and unfamiliar taste, 1 

" For fish and fowl — in fact whate'er was placed 
Before us — had, we found, a novel taste, " 

so the goose served on the Lucilian table was fed 
on grass, not corn ; the endive was gathered from 
the roadside, and the cheese smelt of garlic, — 
the criticism on the dinner being the same, but the 
1 Sat. II. 8. 28. 



THE DINNER OF NASIDIENCJS 1 77 

details, as usual, fuller in the old poet. Chance 
has not preserved for us any allusion to the down- 
fall of the hangings ; but we have some common- 
places of consolation quite in the same vein as the 
platitudes with which Nomentanus and Balatro af- 
fected to comfort Nasidienus under the disaster of 
the descent of the awning on the table : " Life is but 
a game of chance, let us take what we can get ; it 
will be* all the same in a hundred years." 1 Just 
as Pope perceived that some of the tales of Chau- 
cer might be made quite acceptable to the court 
of Queen Anne, if unintelligible archaism and ex- 
cessive coarseness were removed, so Horace saw 
that the humor and keenness of observation which 
made the Lucilian " Saturae " household words to 
Cicero might still win their way pleasantly to the 
molles auriculae of Augustan Rome, if modernized 
and primed of redundancy and pedantry. 

It was not only in the descriptive pieces that 
Horace reset and polished the uncut dia- 

Horace's 

monds of his rude predecessor. Some- morales- 
times we find that the whole train of 
thought in one of his moralizing essays on man 
is due to the elder poet. It is a singular acci- 
dent — indeed, it almost amounts to a miracle 
when we remember what was the vehicle of the 
fragments — that chance should have sometimes 
preserved for us several apparently consecutive 
utterances of the old satirist, and that thus, in 
some cases, beside the restored structure we can 
1 XIV. io. 



178 HORACE 



discern the traces of the original edifice. The 
first Satire of Horace seems to be as clearly a mod- 
ernized version of Lucilius as Pope's imitations 
are modernized versions of Horace. Nonius, in 
illustrating a meaning of olim, quotes a passage 1 
from Lucilius which shows that the latter, like 
Horace, had adduced the ant as a type of fore- 
sight. I have already referred to the passage in 
which Horace drives home the Lucilian lesson that 
enough is as good as a feast, using the same illus- 
tration, but banishing the obsolete verb frunis- 
cor. The rest of the Satire deals with the insatia- 
bleness of the fool, 2 the universal and excessive 
pursuit of riches, 3 and the undue weight given to 
property in the estimate of a man's worth. 4 All 
these notes are, as we have seen, struck in the 
fragments of Lucilius, and in both poets 5 the les- 
son is enforced by the instance of the punishment 
of Tantalus. 

Again, in the third Satire of the first book 
there is reason to believe that the train of thought 
is in the main Lucilian. Nonius, in proving the 

1 " Sic tu illos fructus quaeras adversa hieme olim 

Queis uti possis et delectare domi te." — XIX. 2. 

2 V.~48. 

8 " Rugosi passique senes eadem omnia quaerunt," a frag- 
ment handed down by Nonius as an example oiftassus, " dry." 

4 " Quantum habeas tantum ipse sies tantique habearis " 
(V. 22), preserved by a scholiast on Juvenal III. 142, and 
clearly the origin of " nil satis est, inquit, quia tanti quantum 
habeas sis" (Horace, Sat. I. 1. 62). 

5 Hor. Sat. I. 1. 68 ; Luc. III. 59. 



HORACE'S MORAL ESSAYS 1 79 

use of differre in the sense of "to be different 
from," quotes a verse in which Lucilius uses 
verrucae to point a moral, as Horace does in the 
seventy-third verse of this Satire in recommending 
mutual forbearance ; and there are clear statements 
in the " Saturae " of the Stoic paradox so familiar in 
Horace, that the ideal wise man is master of every 
art, not only beautiful, rich, and puissant, but 
even the best cobbler. 1 In touching on the same 
theme of avarice in the second book of the Satires 
(III. 155), we find that he has taken from Lucilius 
(XXVIII. 33) the physician's warning to the 
miser that he is killing himself to save the cost of 
a basin of rice-gruel, and that in the fifth Satire of 
the same book he has borrowed the visit of Ulysses 
to Tiresias in the underworld (XXX. 113) to in- 
quire how he is to amass wealth and repair the 
inroads made on his fortune by the greedy suitors 
of Penelope ; and that the two poets agree in 
making light of her fidelity to her absent spouse. 
The favorite Horatian doctrine (e. g. Sat. II. 2. 129- 
135), that we have no abiding city here, and that 
the goods of fortune are but a loan to us, finds 
characteristic expression in a fragment of Lucilius 
(XXVII. 7) in which he says that he feels he has 
only the use (chresin), not the possession of all that 
is counted his. And the celebrated passage in the 
same Satire (II. 2. 28), the keynote of which is 
" Cocto nura adest honor idem ? " — 

1 " Sarcinatorem esse summum, suere centonem optume." 

XXVIII. 45. 



l8o HORACE 



"What ? Do you eat the feathers ? When 't is drest 
And sent to table, does it still look best ? " — 

is obviously borrowed from the Lucilian 

" Cook cares not a jot for the gaudy tail, if the fowl be 
plump and fat." x 

The Gallonius who points the moral is a Lucilian 
character, and we have in the fragments the fish 
"caught between the bridges" of Sat. II. 2. 32. 2 
Even in the condemnation of undue admiration of 
the ancients, the Augustan satirist seems to have 
walked in the steps of the Republican, whom we 
find ridiculing a passage from the " Thyestes " of 
Ennius, and the monstrous compounds of Pacu- 
vius. 3 

It is to be observed I do not dwell on mere coin- 
cidences of expression, which of course are fre- 
quent, but only on such coincidences as seem to 
show that certain pieces of the two poets had a 
common basis and frame, and proceeded from the 
same starting-point along the same lines to the 
same conclusion. Parallelism, even in the use 
of rare expressions, such as cerebrosus for "angry," 
and sententia dia for "a wise saw," do not, of 
course, add material support to our argument, 
except as showing a mind thoroughly imbued 
with the vocabulary of the "Saturae." But more 

1 " Cocu' non curat caudam insignem esse hilum dum pin- 

guis siet."— -XXVII. 12. 

2 " Pontes Tiberinu' duo inter captu' catillo." — Incert. 50. 
8 " Nerei repandirostrum incurvicervicum pecus." 



FIGURE BORROWED FROM LUCILIUS l8l 

significant is the employment by both of a far 
from obvious fisrure. When Horace _ 

° Example 

writes (" De Arte Poetica," 431) that the of a figure 
wailing of a hired mourner at a funeral from Lu- 
is often more expressive and affecting 
than genuine grief, — 

" Hired mourners at a funeral say and do 
A little more than they whose grief is true," — 

he does not think it necessary, as a modern writer 
would, to tell his readers that he did not conceive 
the simile himself, but took it from the Lucilian 
couplet, — 

"As hireling mourners o'er a bier with tearing of hair and 
shrieks 
Eclipse by art the heartfelt pain of woe that hardly 
speaks." l 

Nay, more : Horace in drawing upon Lucilius would 
have claimed and received the praise of originality 
as conceived by the Latin poets and critics, who 
sincerely ascribed that quality to any writer who 
selected a new model instead of merely producing 
a new imitation of an already hackneyed master- 
piece. Thus we find Plautus complaining that it 
is hard to find a Greek play which enforces the 
moral that honesty is the best policy, and in which 
virtue triumphs in the end. The idea of construct- 
ing such a plot does not seem even to have oc- 
curred to the Latin dramatist. 

1 " Ut mercede quae conductae flent alieno in funere 

Praeficae multo et capillos scindunt et clamant magis." 

XXVII. 18. 



1 82 HORACE 



It is not in the Satires only that Horace has ad- 
The Epis- dressed himself to the task of refurbish- 
ties. m g thg WO rk of his predecessor. The 

fourteenth Epistle of the first book is clearly a Lu- 
cilian restoration. The Epistle professes to be ad- 
dressed to his vilicus, or farm-bailiff, who, being 
obliged to live in the country, longs for town. 
Horace contrasts with this feeling his own prefer- 
ence for the country, and accounts for that pref- 
erence by his sense of the immunity which rural 
retirement enjoys from the besetting sins of envy, 
hatred, and malice and all uncharitableness. This 
is not the kind of letter which we should have ex- 
pected the poet to address to a common drudge 
(fnediastimis) ; nor was it ever meant to meet his 
eyes : it was written to be admired by Maecenas 
and his friends as a clever restoration of an an- 
tique. There is not a remarkable expression in the 
letter which has not its origin in Lucilius ; and it 
is very singular that the accident whereby gram- 
marians have preserved for us several words and 
phrases from the old piece should have revealed a 
fact which would otherwise never have been sus- 
pected. Horace tells his bailiff that there are 
weeds of the mind as well as of the soil, and pro- 
poses to try whether he or his bailiff will prove 
the more successful weeder, the one in the moral 
field, the other in the material : — 

" Let 's have a match in husbandry : we '11 try 
Which can do weeding better, you or I." 



THE EPISTLES 1 83 

Now Nonius, in illustrating a strange use of the 
verb stare, quotes from Lucilius a phrase, — 

" My soul 's thick-set with thorns," 1 

which strikes the dominant chord of the piece. 
Further, each writer 2 describes his mind as chaf- 
ing against the restraints of the body, andlonging 
to burst its barriers and be away. Lucilius 3 sighs 
for a sphere in which he is not " given a squint" 
(strabonem fieri) by looking askance at the bless- 
ings of his neighbors. Horace says that in the 
country no one looks askance at (pbliquo oculo li- 
mat) the good things of others, and that that is the 
reason why he likes it better than the town. Hor- 
ace declares that the " savage wilds " (inkospita 
tesca), as some people call them, are charming to 
him ; Lucilius says that as he roams through the 
"savage wilds," using the very same words, all his 
imaginings take on a new grace and charm. It can 
hardly be questioned that we have in this case a 
clear Lucilian basis for a Horatian piece ; and that 
Horace did little more than soften down the asper- 
ities of the earlier poem, and give it an imaginary 
connection with his own daily life. 4 

1 " Stat sentibu' pectus." — V. 4. 

2 Hor. Efiist. I. 14. 69 ; Luc. V. 2, 3. 

3 XXVII. 8. 

4 A very curious parallel in our own literature to the Ho- 
ratian use of the raw material of Lucilius has lately been 
brought to light by a letter of Mr. Walter Skeat to the 
Athenceum of August 8, 1 891, in which he shows that Shake- 
speare, in the famous soliloquy of Hamlet, " To be or not to 



1 84 HORACE 



In the Epodes and Odes the models of Horace 
TheEpodes were nearly altogether Greek, but we 
and Odes. come occasionally on a figure of speech 
or fancy which does not suggest a Hellenic origin. 
Goethe once complained of the " fearful realism" 
of Horace, and we certainly have some examples of 
this in the Odes, where it would seem most out of 
place. Perhaps one of the most tasteless efforts 
of fancy in these poems is the comparison between 
the insatiable desire of riches and the unquench- 
able thirst of dropsy, 1 and it can hardly have had a 
Greek source. If he did not take the idea from 
Lucilius, it is certainly a curious coincidence that 
that poet, with whose works he was so familiar, 
should have said that a covetous person had a 
"spiritual dropsy." 2 Probably enough, many of 
the expressions of Horace which have been con- 
demned by modern taste as unsuitable to lyric 
poetry would be found to be due to Lucilius and 
the old Latin literature, though chance has not 
disclosed their origin. This would account for 
such strange deviations from the lyric manner as 
Horace makes when in an Alcaic ode he calls his 
she-goats " wives of a foetid spouse ; " 3 sings of 
"long -eared oaks," 4 and "the lust that drives 

be" (Act III. Sc. i), adopted largely the train of thought 
of a long passage in the Roniaunt of the Rose, and even 
borrowed some of the expressions. 

1 " Crescit indulgens sibi dims hydrops." — Carm. II. 2. 13. 

2 "Aquam te in animo habere intercutem." — XXVIII. 27. 

3 " Olentis uxores mariti." — Carm. I. 17. 7. 

4 " Auritas quercus." — Carm. I. 12. 11. 



THE EPODES AND ODES 1 85 

mad the horses' dams ; " : or pictures Venus as 
" snuffing up the incense ; " 2 and Doom, with her 
paraphernalia of huge nails, wedges, clamps, and 
molten lead. 3 Probably if we had more numerous 
fragments from the works of Lucilius, or if they 
had come down to us in v,fiorilegium, like that in 
which Stobaeus preserved so many of the gems of 
Euripides, we should find that the Epodes owed a 
great deal to the old poet. At present we cannot 
find in them any trace of Lucilius, except a line 
preserved to illustrate the meaning of sudum as ap- 
plied to " fair weather," 4 which recalls the clearly 
insincere execrations hurled on the departing Mae- 
vius in Epode X. 

Many different views have been taken of the 
nature of the Odes and the relation of 

. , Divergent 

that portion of Horaces work to the views about 
rest. Diametrically opposite theories 
have been propounded. Between the dictum of 
Gruppe, " Horace is Horace only in his Odes," 
and that of Lehrs, "the real Horace is never 
found in his Odes," almost every intervening 
shade of opinion has found defenders. Dr. Ver- 
rall, in his highly ingenious " Studies in the Odes 
of Horace," sees in them the most pointed yet 
covert allusion to obscure incidents in the private 
history of the Augustan court, its supporters and 

1 " Quae solet matres furiare equorum." — Ca?'m. I. 25. 13. 

2 Carm. IV. 1. 21. 3 Carm. I. 35. 17. 

4 " Nee ventorum flamina flando suda secundent." 

XXIX. 102. 



HORACE 



its assailants, and the secret intrigues which threat- 
ened the yet unstable throne of the Emperor. 
Others, like Sir Theodore Martin, are content to 
dwell on " the consummate grace and finish of the 
Odes," and to regard them only as the passing ex- 
pressions of varying phases of artistic feeling, but 
not conveying, at least in the love-songs, the sin- 
cere sentiment of the writer. The most recent of 
the critics of Horace, whose views I will put be- 
fore you anon, sees in them nothing but mere ex- 
ercises in the handling of the Greek metres. But 
in one judgment all must agree : good or bad, real 
or artificial, they have defied imitation. No at- 
tempt to reproduce their effect has had even a 
moderate measure of success. 

A consideration which seems to me to have 
imaginary been hardly sufficiently taken into ac- 
inadents. CO unt by the many critics of the Odes 
is the fact that Horace looked on himself as a 
restorer, — as one whose task it was to clothe 
the beauties of Greek lyric poetry in a Latin 
garb. Keeping this view before us, we may doubt 
the objective reality of the incident related in 
the fourth Ode of the third book, how the wood- 
pigeons that draw the car of Venus found the 
child poet, destined to be the singer of Love, 
asleep on the hillside, weary and drowsy after his 
play, and covered him with leaves to protect him 
from the snakes and wild beasts. There is lit- 
tle doubt that both here and also in a much less 
fanciful passage, when he tells how he joined in 



IMAGINARY INCIDENTS 1 87 

the flight at Philippi, ingloriously leaving behind 
him his shield, he is merely introducing, as in duty 
bound, into the life of the Roman lyrist the le- 
gends connected with the masters of the Greek 
lyre. If divine protection was vouchsafed to the 
infancy of Pindar, Stesichorus, and Aeschylus, 
surely the Muses of Calabria must have been 
equally careful of the tender age of the Roman 
lyrist ; and if Alcaeus, Archilochus, and Ana- 
creon fled weaponless from the field of battle, why 
should Horace fail to make in his own case a sim- 
ilar confession ? There was no fear that it would 
be understood literally. The very Pompeius, to 
whom he addressed that confession, had often 
borne the brunt of battle beside him in the cam- 
paign under Brutus. He would no more take in 
its literal sense the self-accusation of cowardice 
than the immediately succeeding boast that Mer- 
cury carried the poet unhurt through the foe, like 
the favorites of the gods in Homer, wrapped in a 
dense cloud. 

When Maecenas presented Horace with his Sa- 
bine farm he conferred on him the very Horace's 
gift which was most suitable to the poet's f wdcome m 
requirements and desires. He tells us P res ent. 
himself how the first fig is the signal for the under- 
taker's train to appear in the streets of Rome, 1 and 
how the leaden breath of Auster then gives an un- 
mistakable signal to city folk to seek the seaside or 

1 " Ficus prima calorque 
Designatorem decorat lictoribus atris." — Epist. I. 7. 5. 



1 88 HORACE 



the Latin or Sabine hills. Horace seems generally 
to have managed to turn the head of his little mule 
towards the country in the malarious months, some- 
times going so far as Tibur or Tarentum, which he 
tells us : were his favorite resorts. But it was not 
until he experienced the generosity of Maecenas 
that he ever left Rome, save at seasons when it 
was an imperative necessity to go. It was this very 
intimacy with Maecenas which made a rural re- 
treat absolutely indispensable. Juvenal maintains 
that ease of circumstances and material comfort and 
luxury are essential conditions of success in the 
poet's art. If Virgil had had nothing better than 
water to drink, all the snakes would have fallen from 
the viperous tresses of Allecto. But Horace was an 
exception to his rule. He tells us that it was the 
boldness inspired by stern necessity which drove 
him to poetry. As long as he was the poor hack 
whom poverty had driven to literature he could 
call his time his own, even in Rome ; but as the 
friend of Maecenas, privacy became for him impos- 
sible. We read again and again how he was 
besieged by politicians, literary aspirants, even pro- 

1 " Tibur Argeo positum colono 
Sit meae sedes utinam senectae, 
Sit modus lasso maris et viarum 
Militiaeque. 

" Unde si Parcae prohibent iniquae 
Dulce pellitis ovibus Galaesi 
Flumen et regnata petam Laconi 

Rura Phalantho." — Carm. II. 6. 5-12. 



NOT A LOVER OF THE COUNTRY 1 89 

fessional newsmongers and diners-out, for infor- 
mation direct from the fountain-head of policy and 
fashion ; and how men shook their heads, and 
admired his profound reserve, when he told them 
that he was not the depositary of the secrets of 
Augustus and Maecenas. There was no secure 
leisure in Rome for the intimate of Maecenas, and 
no real work could be undertaken unless there 
were a refuge to which to fly. When Maecenas 
conferred on him a farm in the Sabine hills, about 
thirty miles, or a day's journey, from Rome, he 
gave the poet what was not only a luxury but a 
necessity. 

But Horace was not a lover of the country for 
its own sake. It is to him delightful But Horace 
only as a retreat from the worries of J^ve^ofthe 
town, and when he is most enthusiastic countr y- 
in the praises of his life in the country we find that 
the pleasures on which he dwells most are those 
which belong more fitly to town. " O noctes ce- 
naeque Deum ! " 1 is his exclamation when he 
thinks, not of the entertainments of Maecenas and 
Pollio, but of the dinners in his Sabine farm, where 
the local notabilities sat round his plain but plenti- 
ful table and discussed, not art or scandal, but phi- 
losophy and the conduct of life, garnishing their 
discourse with homely but appropriate "old saws 
and modern instances." In the Odes, where espe- 
cially we should expect to find genuine love of Na- 
ture if any such feeling were his, he alludes to 
1 Sat. II. 6. 65. 



190 HORACE 



Nature, not to express his aesthetic pleasure in 
her various moods, but to point his philosophic 
maxims. The changes of the weather and the 
courses of the seasons are described only to intro- 
duce the reflection that our hopes, too, and our 
fears, have for their objects only that which is 
mutable, and our griefs as well as our joys should 
be moderate and brief. His Odes breathe a spirit 
which recalls to us the sad smile of the Persian 
Omar Khayyam, — 

" What boots it to repeat 
How time is slipping underneath our feet? 

Unborn to-morrow and dead yesterday, — 
Why fret about them if to-day be sweet ? " 

In one of the prettiest of them we read how the 
heavy and gloomy pine, and the light poplar white 
in the wind, love with their wedded boughs to 
make a friendly shade, while the prattling brook 
frets in its haste down its winding channel. But 
why this pretty picture ? To remind us that, 
though now Nature smiles on us, death will soon 
be on us all, both high and low. Peace of mind 
is to be gained neither by seeking rural scenes 
nor by crossing wide seas. Man carries happiness 
and unhappiness with him wherever he goes, and 
cannot fly from himself though he leave his father- 
land far behind him. His allusions to Nature do 
not arise,' I repeat, from any love of Nature, or 
sympathetic observation of her various moods, but 
from a desire to point philosophic reflections and 
aphorisms. Indeed, that very poem which of all 



NOT A LOVER OF THE COUNTRY 191 

that Horace has written enters with most zest 
into the delights of country life is, rightly viewed, a 
clear proof of the poet's insensibility to these pleas- 
ures. It is nothing but an elaborate piece of ridi- 
cule directed against those who then were prone, 
as some are now, to become ecstatic about the 
country, though quite unqualified to appreciate its 
charm sincerely. In the best of his Epodes, the 
second, the work of his ardent youth, we have a 
glorification of rural life which enters into every 
detail of its joys with an enthusiasm hardly less 
than that which inspires Virgil in the Georgics 
and Eclogues. It is only after sixty-six verses of 
high-wrought sentiment that we discover that the 
speaker is not Horace but the usurer Alfius, and 
that the moral of the poem is, that speculative en- 
thusiasm has very little chance against a ruling 
passion of a practical kind, and that many praise 
the country who would be very unfit and very loth 
to live in it. The best parallel one can recall to the 
sustained irony of the Epode is the piece in which 
Calverley describes the city clerk who left the 
heat and noise and brass bands of Camden Hill to 
enjoy his well-earned holiday. We read how he 
laughed when he felt the cool breeze fanning his 
cheek and the salt spray on his lip, and when 
all the sights and sounds and fragrances of the 
country, described with Horatian skill, were wafted 
to him ; then how, when he remembered the dusty 
streets he had left, — 



192 HORACE 



" At the thought 
He laughed again, and softly drew 

That ' Morning Herald,' that he 'd bought, 
Forth from his breast, and read it through." 

There is not in literature a more musical or a more 
insincere glorification of the country ; and it differs 
from the spirit of many of his Odes only in this, — 
that here the poet shows his hand, and lets us see 
that he is laughing at what we should now call the 
Lake school of poets and their admirers. 

It is with some diffidence that I have ventured to 
put forward some considerations, which, 

Insincerity \ 

of his love if they do not seem to convict Horace 
of a certain degree of insincerity, at all 
events would tend to show him as a mere restorer 
where he has been held to be a creator, and a 
literary poseur where he has been thought to be a 
poetical exponent of his real feelings. But for 
one department of his work it would be idle to 
claim the merit of sincerity. Even his warmest 
admirers have detected a false ring in his odes of 
love. Sir Theodore Martin writes : " His deepest 
feeling is but a ferment of the blood ; it is never 
the all-absorbing devotion of the heart." The most 
recent Continental criticism goes much further in 
the way of skepticism about the genuineness of his 
expressed feelings. In connection with it let us 
examine some curious features in the lyric poetry 
of Horace. 

No reader of the Odes, however careless, can 
have failed to notice the extraordinary difficulty 



DIVERGENT VIEWS OF THE ODES 193 

of discovering in them anything like a connected 
train of thought. One may safely say that hitherto 
there has been no even moderately successful at- 
tempt to meet this difficulty. Bentley's method 
was, as might be expected, to have recourse to 
wholesale correction of the text. But his insre- 
nuity addressed itself mainly to difficulties of ex- 
pression and construction, and indeed hardly a cor- 
rection of his is now accepted in constituting the 
text of the Odes. Peerlkamp, the most 
Bentleian of Bentley's successors, devel- 
oping the principle of his master, boldly declares : 
" I do not accept as the work of Horace anything 
but what is so exquisitely perfect that you cannot 
change it without spoiling it." The result is, that 
there is hardly an Ode in which Peerlkamp does 
not detect corruption and interpolation, hardly one 
in which he does not resort to emendation, exci- 
sion, and transposition. The slightest deviation 
from the most exquisite taste, from the most natu- 
ral and logical march of thought, from the most 
flawless accuracy and beauty of expression, is to 
him a complete proof that the offending passage 
could not have come from the hand of Horace. 
Goethe, going to the opposite extreme, 
held hardly anything to be unworthy of 
Horace, to whom he denied all poetic gifts, unless 
deftness in the use of language, and skill in repro- 
ducing the Greek metres, could be so de- 
scribed. Hartman goes nearly as far as 
the great German poet and critic. He regards the 



194 HORACE 



Odes simply as exercises in metre, and thinks that 
Horace did not trouble himself about consecutive- 
ness of thought, provided the verses flowed 
smoothly, and that he was always ready to surren- 
der ease of transition and even correctness of ex- 
pression, when the exigencies of his dainty metres 
demanded the sacrifice. And truly in some cases 
he has much to say for his theory. When we read 
how "Virtue will refuse the name of happy to 
kings, and will give (not the name of happy, but) 
the kingly throne and diadem to him who, without 
turning to gaze again, can look on huge heaps," 1 
we cannot help asking ourselves whether the poet 
has really said what he wished to say. Heaps of 
what ? Of treasures, of course, say the commen- 
tators. But Horace has not written "heaps of 
treasures," he has only written "heaps." Then, 
Virtue, having refused the name of happy to kings, 
grants that of king to him who has subdued cov- 
etousness ; and " eye unturned-back " is certainly 
far from clear. Peerlkamp rewrites the stanza, in- 
serting auri ; the English commentators translate 
as if Horace had written auri acervos, but leave the 
words untouched. Hartman says Horace would 
gladly have written thesauros, but unfortunately it 
would not scan. It is this subservience of expres- 
sion to metre which so often reminds us of the 
work of the Irish Melodist, who is so much more 
careful of the sound than of the sense. 

1 " Quisquis ingentes oculo irretorto 

Spectat acervos. "' — Carm. II. 2. 24. 



HIS ATTITUDE TOWARDS POETRY 1 95 

" Fill the bumper fair ! 

Every drop we sprinkle 
From the brow of care 

Smoothes away a wrinkle," 

runs very trippingly on the tongue, but fair is 
a very poor epithet for a bumper, and sprinkle is 
quite without meaning. 

In point of fact, there would have been more to 
excite our surprise if Horace had really Horace's 
succeeded in producing genuine poetry ^wSds 
rather than exquisitely musical vers de poetry. 
society when we consider his own account of the 
spirit in which he approached his task. He has 
told us candidly that it was his poverty and not 
his will which consented ; that he would look on 
himself as an incurable lunatic if he would not 
rather be asleep than writing verses, unless com- 
pelled thereto by the spur of actual want ; 1 and 
he quotes the case of the soldier of Lucullus, 
who could do prodigies of valor when destitute, 
but declined to take any further trouble when he 
no longer had his living to get. Horace does not 
compare himself to a melodious nightingale or 

1 " Decisis humilem pennis inopemque paterni 
Et Laris et fundi paupertas impulit audax 
Ut versus facerem ; sed quod non desit habentem 
Quae poterunt unquam satis expurgare cicutae 
Ni melius dormire putem quam scribere versus ? " 

Efiist. II. 2. 50-54. 



196 HORACE 



soaring lark ; he is, he tells us, 1 an industrious bee, 
and with infinite toil he fashions elaborate strains. 
He is not of those who can say, — 

" I do but sing because I must, 
And pipe but as the linnets sing." 

He is of those who sing for their supper. And 
what was his earliest song ? His own boast was 
that in his Epodes he gave to his fellow-country- 
men a specimen of the vigor and versification of 
Archilochus, though he had not the materials or 
the motive of him whcse lampoons drove Lycam- 
bes mad. 2 Hence we have in the fourth Epode a 
furious tirade against — nobody ! At least, nobody 
is mentioned by the lampooner, and not even the 
ancient scholiasts could identify the object of this 
brutum fulmen. It is to show how angry he could 
be if he were angry, — how he could tear in pieces 
a passion completely provided with every requisite 
save an object. It is — 

" A tale 
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, 
Signifying nothing." 

1 " Ego apis Matinae 
More modoque 
Grata carpentis thy ma per laborem 
Plurimum circa nemus uvidique 
Tiburis ripas operosa parvus 

Carmina fingo." — Carm. IV. 2. 27-32. 
2 " Numeros animosque secutus 
Archilochi, non res et agentia verba Lycamben." 

Epist. I. 19. 25. 



SACRIFICE OF CORRECTNESS 1 97 

Pretty nearly the same account may be given of 
the sixth Epode, in which, after heaping abuse on 
some unknown offender, he bids him take care lest 
he bring on himself the terrors of his (the poet's) 
tongue, — " Venomous liar, fool, coward, hound, 
look out, or I shall call you names !" We have al- 
ready seen some reasons to believe that the tenth 
Epode is no more than a Lucilian restoration ; but, 
whatever it is, it carries its insincerity on its face. 
It is probably a Lucilian piece re-dressed in the 
metre of Archilochus. In the Odes, too, we can- 
not help observing not only the prevailing shal- 
lowness of the sentiment, but an occa- 

Incorrect 

sional sacrifice of correctness of expres- expressions 

, , , , . , in the Odes. 

sion when the metre, which is never 
anything but absolute perfection, proves too ex- 
acting. What is the meaning of to "join Libya 
to the distant Gades " ? 2 Surely, "to unite Africa 
to Spain by a bridge." But what the writer meant 
was, " to hold sway over both countries conjointly." 
"This is the birthday of Maecenas " is expressed 
by words which should mean " from this day forth 
Maecenas revises the calendar." 2 In Carm. III. 
8. 15, 3 what he intends to say is, "Keep the lamps 
alight till dawn ;" but Peerlkamp rightly contends 

1 " Libyam remotis | Gadibus jungas." — Carm. II. 2. 10. 
2 " Ex hac 
Luce Maecenas meus affluentes 

Ordinat annos." — Carm. IV. II. 18. 
3 " Vigiles lucernas 
Perfer in lucem." 



HORACE 



that what we now read means " Endure (the glare 
or smell of) the lamps until dawn." " Neither Fa- 
lernian vines nor Formian hills temper my cups" 1 
is as odd a fashion as could be devised of express- 
ing the sentiment, " The wine I drink with water 
is not of an expensive vintage." Carm. II. 20, 2 
supplies a stanza which will compel each editor to 
declare himself a follower of Peerlkamp's or of 
Goethe's method of criticism. Every reader of 
taste must be offended by the verse in which, after 
comparing himself to a soaring bird, he goes on to 
describe how the skin is shrinking and roughening 
on his legs, and pursues the details of an actual 
transformation into a winged creature. " Furcht- 
baren Realitat ! " exclaims the follower of Goethe. 
" Horatio plane abjudicandum " is the verdict of 
the disciple of Peerlkamp. " An exercise in 
metre," says Hartman, "and the metre is per- 
fect." 

The fifth Ode of the second book 3 contains fig- 
ures and expressions which do not quite 

Examples 

of uncer- conform to modern standards of taste, 

but it would be a charming little piece 

were it not for the last two stanzas. Nothing 

1 " Me a nee Falernae 
Temperant vites neque Formiani 

Pocula colles." — Carm. I. 20, 10. 
2 " Jam jam residunt cruribus asperae 
Pelles, et album mutor in alitem 
Superne, nascunturque leves 

Pfer digitos humerosque plumae." 
8 " Nondum subacta ferre jugum valet/' etc. 



EXAMPLES OF UNCERTAIN TOUCH 1 99 

could be prettier than the comparison of the girl 
Lalage, too young to be a wife, to a playful 
heifer, or a cluster of grapes still unripe. The 
too eager lover is assured that the years ripen- 
ing Lalage will gallop for her and creep for him ; 
she will soon be old enough, and he will not be too 
old. Lalage will presently be wooing him, and 
the happy lover will meet her advances with a pas- 
sion " greater than he felt for the shy Pholoe, 
or Chloris, who is as brilliant as moonlight on the 
sea, or as Gyges, who would be mistaken for a girl." 
What a bathos ! After sketching with a few ex- 
quisite touches the piquante unripeness of the girl, 
he goes on to say : " When she is old enough for 
you you will love her — better than shy Pholoe or 
Chloris," comparing the latter to the moon, and to 
Gyges, to whom he then devotes an elaborate 
stanza. The runnel is exquisitely smooth, but its 
shallow waters flow where they will, from their 
natural channel, and end in a puddle. 

The theory that the Odes are little more than 
experiments in the Greek lyric metres, Type- 
having little or no train of connected expounders 
thought or feeling, becomes very tempt- of Hora ce. 
ing when we consider the straits to which com- 
mentators have been reduced by their determina- 
tion never to admit that Horace wrote mere vers 
de societe, or dashed off little vignettes in verse, in- 
tended only to show his felicity in the choice of 
words, and his rare deftness in handling the metres 
newly imported from ancient Hellas. That school 



200 HORA CE 



of expounders of the Old Testament, who insist on 
finding symbolism even in the canclestick and "his 
knops " in Leviticus, have not shown more ill-placed 
industry than has been expended on the well-known 
poem beginning, — 

" O navis referent in mare te novi 
Fluctus," 1 — 

in which Horace warns the bark which has just es- 
caped the storm to put back into port : the wind is 
rising again ; it cannot live in the sea, which is ever 
growing angrier. The bark, according to the type- 
hunting editors, is the Ship of the State. The 
masts, the sails, the Cyclades, the Pontic pine — 
everything must be symbolical, and have its exact 
counterpart in the thing symbolized. His best 
poems are really vers de societe, or little vignettes 
in verse, but the noble army of public school Hora- 
tiolaters will not hear of such expressions, and the 
ponderous German commentators play into their 
hands. For instance, one commentator suggests 
that the Pontic pine points to Sextus Pompeius, 
whose father was the conqueror of Mithridates 
of Pontns. He sees in every chance expression 
more significance than Mr. Puff imported into 
Lord Burleigh's nod in " The Critic." "Politico, 
pinns !" he cries ; " ah, there we have the clue. 
Mithridates was king of Pontus ; Pompey the 
Great conquered Mithridates ; the Pontica pinns 
therefore refers to Pompey's son Sextus." The 
1 Cartn. I. 14. 



TYPE-HUNTING EXPOUNDERS 201 

meaning of the Ode, therefore, according to his 
theory, is that Sextus Pompeius must not again 
embark in a war with Octavian after the treaty of 
Misenum, b. c. 39. As well might we discern in 
the mention of a " Damask blade " an allusion to 
the Crusades. Pontus was the traditional source 
of timber for ship-building, as we learn from a 
poem of Catullus, 1 and the Cyclades are proverbial 
as presenting difficulties of navigation. Horace no 
more had in his mind the Mithridatic wars when 
he wrote Pontica pinus than Tennyson thought 
of the Wars of the Roses when he wrote in " The 
Talking Oak," — 

" She left the novel half uncut 
Upon the rosewood shelf." 

On the same principle the next Ode, — 

" Pastor cum traheret per freta navibus," — 

is by some maintained to be an elaborate allegory 
of Antony and Cleopatra. Ritter draws the paral- 
lel in the minutest detail. Paris hidden by Venus 
in Helen's chamber is Antony taking refuge in 
Cleopatra's ship at Actium, and so forth. The 
scholiast tells us that he is imitating Bacchylides 
in this poem. Whether this be so or not, it is cer- 
tainly remarkable that the Grecian heroes, with 
whose prowess Nereus terrifies Paris as he flies 
with Helen, are not those who were foremost in 
the Achaean ranks ; not those who in the ancient 
myths are said to have met the adulterer in com- 
1 Dedicatio Phaseli, IV. 13. 



202 HORACE 



bat, to have put him to flight, or finally to have slain 
him ; not Menelaus or Philoctetes ; but — such 
heroes as have names which fit the Asclepiads in 
which the piece is written — Ajax the son of Oi'leus, 
Laertiades, Nestor, Teucer, Sthenelus, Meriones, 
Tydides. It can hardly be a mere coincidence 
that we find Horace in another poem, 1 closely akin 
to this in subject, adducing, not the prominent 
heroes in both hosts, but Teucer, Idomeneus, 
Sthenelus, on the Grecian side ; while from the 
Trojans no champion save Hector is named, but 
the metrically convenient Deiphobus. 

It cannot be denied that Hartman's view of the 
nature and genesis of Horace's lyric poetry, based 
as it is on the massive authority of Goethe, ac- 
counts for a good many qualities in the Odes which 
it is hard to explain on any other hypothesis. To 
succeed in concealing the art which was requisite 
to accommodate the Latin language to a metre so 
exigeant as the Asclepiad, the Sapphic, or the Al- 
caic in the hands of Horace, it was often necessary 
to sacrifice the sense to the sound, to introduce 
superfluous tags, to omit a word essential to the 
meaning. Of the last defect we have had an in- 
stance above, where we have seen that the poet 
could only find room for " heaps," when " heaps 
of gold," or some such phrase, was demanded by 
the sense of the passage ; and surely Horace was 
struggling in the shackles of his metre when, in 
warning Pollio how difficult and delicate was the 
1 Carm. IV. 9. 



DEFECTS IN THE ODES 203 

task of writing a history of the Civil War, he tells 
him that he is walking on treacherous ashes which 
conceal a fire beneath. 1 This ought in fitness of 
language to convey the sense that the task which 
Pollio essayed, though it looked easy and safe, was 
really dangerous and difficult ; but this is plainly 
not his meaning, for the dangers and difficulties of 
writing the history of a recent civil war are ob- 
vious and unmistakable, and Horace has already 
dwelt on them in this poem. Indeed, any new 
theory, however daring, would be acceptable, if 
it were only to account for those extraordinary 
parenthetic accretions which disfigure some of the 
finest Odes, notably the fourth of the fourth 
book, which begins with such spirit with the 
words, — 

" Qualem ministrum fulminis alitem," — 

and in which the verses 18-22 2 seem to be added 
by the poet in mockery of the art to which his 
poverty drove him, and which he considers it 
would be lunacy to practice if one could afford to 
be idle. 

We have already referred to the ring of insin- 
cerity in the love poems of Horace, the false note 

1 " Incedis per ignes 
Suppositos cineri doloso." — Car7n. II, I. 7, 8„ 

2 " Quibus 
Mos unde deductus per omne 

Tempus Amazonia securi 
Dextras obarmet quaerere distuli, 
Nee scire fas est omnia." 



204 HORACE 



which sounds so cracked and thin amid the sighs 
_ . of Propertius and the groans of Catullus. 

Further ex- L ° 

ampies of He is merely playing the lover because a 

insincerity . . 

in the love lyric poet ought to be in love, and some- 
poems ' times he misrepresents almost ludicrously 

the signs of a real passion. " It is only three years 
ago that I was mad about Inachia," he tells Pettius 
in the eleventh Epode, " and here I am in love 
again." Three years ! Three days without love is 
a lifetime to the real lover : — 

" So thou hast come at last ! Thrice night has followed the 
day. 
Three days longing ! And one were enough to leave me 



In another love-ditty (Epode XIV.) he tells Mae- 
cenas that he cannot write poetry because he is 
in love — a strange reason — with Phryne, who, 
however, is not satisfied with him alone, and has 
other admirers ; but this does not seem to disturb 
our philosophic lover, and only leads him to con- 
gratulate Maecenas on the greater happiness of his 
lot because the girl he loves is — faithful to him 
alone ? No, because she is so very pretty. What ! 
Was Phryne, then, plain as well as faithless ? We 
do not know ; her lover seems to have forgotten 
all about her before he finished the Epode, just 
as he forgot all about Lalage when he began to 
think of Chloris and Gyges. Then how sweetly 

1 ijAvOes, 3> (pi\e Ka>pe, rpira aw vvkt\ tcai do?. 
fjhvQes' ol Se irodevvres iv ^jxari yripiaKovri. 

Theocr. XII. i, 2. 



INSINCERITY IN THE LOVE-POEMS 205 

but uncharacteristically reasonable is the lover who 
bids his servant summon the charming Neaera in 
all haste ! 1 adding, however : " If there is any diffi- 
culty about her coming, never mind ; return with- 
out her." In somewhat the same spirit Mercury 
is summoned 2 to bring the magic of his lyre to 
win the obdurate ear of Lyde ; but so little does 
the lover really care about the success of his suit 
that he fills a long Ode with the recital of the mira- 
cles music can work, telling how it can beguile the 
pain even of the sufferers in the underworld, Ixion, 
Tityus, and the Danaids, whose entirely irrelevant 
story he tells with great command of language and 
metre, but very little reference to Lyde. 

Indeed, for this particular department of his 
work it would be idle to claim sincerity, and even 
his stanchest champions have abandoned the at- 
tempt. His love songs are bright, scentless flow- 
ers which charm the eye, but do not carry to the 
heart that message of memory and association 
with which the perfume of flowers is charged. 
They are not wildwood violets hidden in the green, 
but hothouse orchids or azaleas displayed in a par- 
terre. One thinks for a moment that for Cinara he 
had a genuine love in his young days, until we find 
him boasting in middle age that he had found fa- 

1 " Die et argutae properet Neaerae 

Murrheum nodo cohibere crinem : 
Si per invisum mora janitorem 

Fiet, abito." — Carm. III. 14. 21. 

2 Carm. III. 11. 



206 HORACE 



vor in her eyes without pecuniary gifts, " insatiable 
as she was." His Odes afford no reason why we 
should believe that he was ever in love. Even such 
an advocate for Horace as the late Professor Sel- 
lar admits that his liaisons with the Leuconoes and 
Neobules of his Odes, whether they are of the 
Dichtung or of the Wahrheit of his life, seem to 
be as much inspired by an interest in human na- 
ture as by any more ardent feeling, and that his 
tone is more that of persiflage than of either pas- 
sion or sentiment ; that in his lampoons the feel- 
ing was sometimes that of the imitative artist 
rather than the man ; and that even in his matur- 
est art the thought is often obvious and common- 
place. In his Odes Horace thought chiefly about 
felicity of expression, and deftness in the handling 
of new and dainty metres, and, provided the verses 
flowed smoothly and the phraseology showed his 
curiosa felicitas, did not much trouble himself 
whether the train of ideas was consecutive, or in- 
deed whether there was any regular march of 
thought at all. 

Horace as a literary ' critic is often instructive, 
and always highly suggestive, but is oc- 

Horace as . J ° J °° 

a literary casionally a very unsafe guide. His view 
of the function of the Greek chorus is 
perhaps not more inadequate than might have 
been expected in his day. But a not very deep 
study of the Greek drama might have shown him 
that the Dens ex machina in many of the plays 
of Euripides (notably the " Bacchae ") has no knot 



AS A LITERARY CRITIC 207 

whatever to untie by his intervention, the action 
being completed before the god appears. Some of 
his comments on the moral purport of the "Bac- 
chae " would seem to show that he had never 
read the play ; and it naturally struck Macaulay, a 
great admirer of Horace, as remarkable that he 
should have mentioned Aeschylus only as the in- 
troducer of certain mechanical improvements in 
stage properties. Professor Jebb (" Classical Greek 
Poetry," p. 43) makes an interesting comment on his 
conception of the character of Achilles. " Modern 
readers have too often taken their idea of the Ho- 
meric Achilles from the misleading summary of 
his character by Horace, ' Let him deny that laws 
were made for him, and acknowledge no umpire 
but the sword.' The very keynote in the charac- 
ter of the Homeric Achilles is his burning indigna- 
tion at a wrong, at a gross breach of justice ; he 
does not represent the sword as against right, but 
right as against tyranny." Finally, Horace tells us 
that Homer put before us in the person of Ulysses 
an example of what virtue and wisdom could do, and 
especially refers to the episode of Circe. Horace 
contrasts the greediness of the crew with the self- 
restraint of Ulysses. But in the incident as de- 
scribed in the Odyssey neither the praise nor the 
blame finds any countenance. The companions of 
Ulysses follow the universal practice in accepting 
the hospitality offered to strangers, the fatal conse- 
quences of which they could have no ground for 
suspecting. Ulysses is preserved from their fate, 



208 HORACE 



not by any self-command on his own part, but by 
a previous divine warning and a special antidote 
which had not been vouchsafed to the rest. To 
ascribe a didactic purpose to the Odyssey — ex- 
cept in so far as any series of adventures admirably 
told may imply a lesson though the narrator is un- 
conscious of it — is to misconceive completely the 
character of the poem. 

I have dwelt chiefly on the limitations of Hor- 
ace's art because they are so much less 

Chief source _ J 

of his popu- obvious than his excellences, which are 

larity with 

the modern easily recognized and more likely to be 
exaggerated than unduly depreciated. 
The gaiety of his spirit and the music of his 
lyrics will ever fascinate the young ; his shrewd 
common sense will attract the man of the world, 
whatever be his time of life, his country, or his 
epoch ; and he will always be the most perfect 
exponent of the actual life and movement of the 
Augustan age. But may we not detect in him 
some more special and individual quality of char- 
acter which has endeared him so universally to 
gentlemen of every race and every period, so that 
one can hardly conceive the time when Horace 
will have ceased to form part of the mental furni- 
ture of, at all events, every English-speaking gen- 
tleman ? I think the quality is not hard to find. It 
is that Horace was essentially a gentleman himself. 
Lord Shaftesbury called him the most gentleman- 
like of the Roman poets, and I do not think he 
has ever been better described. As far as birth 



GENTLE MANLINESS OF HIS STYLE 209 

goes, none of the great Roman poets — if we except 
the dramatists — less deserve the grand old name 
of gentleman. Catullus and Calvus belonged to 
the aristocracy ; Lucilius was a knight ; and Tibul- 
lus, Propertius, and Ovid were of equestrian rank ; 
Virgil's father was a man of property : but Hor- 
ace was the son of an emancipated slave. Yet 
never was the name " gentleman " less " soiled with 
ignoble use " than when it was applied to Horace 
by the author of the "Characteristics." Beranger 
boasted of his lowly origin ; 1 Horace neither con- 
ceals it nor boasts of it. He is 

" Too proud to care from whence he came." 

The gentlemanliness of Horace's style is of one to 
the manner born. He often reminds us of Addi- 
son, and still oftener of Thackeray, especially when 
he laughs at himself, and holds up his own follies 
and weaknesses to ridicule in a way which disarms 
hostile criticism, and blunts the shaft even of ma- 
lignity. And who has not called to mind Horace's 
genial acceptance of the calm joys of middle age, 
with his "lenit albescens animos capillus " and a 
hundred like sentiments, in reading some of Thack- 
eray's ballads ? I know no poem in English — not 

1 The " Je suis vilain et tres vilain " of Beranger is almost 
as alien from the refined indifference of Horace as is the 
obsequious coxcombry of Moore, or the petulant self-con- 
sciousness of Pope. Burns has more in common with Hor- 
ace : — 

" My freedom 's a lairdship nae monarch can touch " 

is quite in the manly tone of the Roman. 



210 HORACE 



professedly an imitation — more Horatian in tone 
than Thackeray's " Age of Wisdom : " — 

" Forty times over let Michaelmas pass — 
Grizzling hair the brain doth clear — 
Then you know a boy is an ass, 
Then you know the worth of a lass, 
Once you have come to forty year. 

" Gillian 's dead — God rest her bier ! 
How I loved her twenty years syne ! 
Marian 's married, but I sit here, 
Alone and merry at forty year, 

Dipping my nose in the Gascon wine." 

Horace is at the very opposite pole to snobbish- 
ness. There is not a trace in his writings of mean 
admiration of mean things, nor is there a sign of 
sycophancy or subserviency in his character and 
conduct. In his time a patron was an absolute ne- 
cessity to a man of letters. The rewards of litera- 
ture were to a large extent indirect, and took the 
form of presents, appointments, and endowments 
of various sorts, in an age when there was no copy- 
right, and every wealthy Roman who aspired to be 
a man of taste kept an establishment of literary 
slaves for the purpose of copying popular works, 
and was not withheld by any statute or sentiment 
from multiplying copies of his favorite author for 
presentation, or even for sale. A publishing firm 
would not give much for a work which would be 
public property as soon as a few copies came into 
the hands of a few rich men. Martial tells us that 
his poems are on the lips of every one, — that even 



RELATIONS TOWARDS MAECENAS 211 

in remote Britain he is quoted and recited. "But," 
he adds, "what good to me ? My purse never dis- 
covers how popular they are." 

In these circumstances a patron was indispen- 
sable to one who aspired to live by his 

J His relations 

pen. The friendship of Maecenas was towards 
the greatest boon that could have been 
conferred on Horace. Observe, then, the growth 
of their friendship. On their first interview Hor- 
ace's words were few and hesitating, the replies of 
Maecenas were curt and commonplace. Horace 
did not at once make a strong impression. The 
patron and the poet did not meet again for nine 
months, but thenceforth the intimacy ripened nat- 
urally and rapidly. Within a year Maecenas took 
Horace with him on his journey to Brundisium, 
and about three years afterwards he presented him 
with the Sabine farm. But during all this time 
the independence of Horace is absolute. There 
is not a word of sycophancy. Maecenas was a 
poet — a bad poet — to whom a word of com- 
mendation from Horace would no doubt have been 
grateful, but no such word did he ever get ; in- 
deed, we find no reference at all to any literary 
projects of Maecenas except a prose history of the 
achievements of Augustus not at the time begun, 
and probably never actually written. One day in 
August Horace went to the country, intending to 
stay a week. His sojourn extended over a month, 
and Maecenas, impatient of the prolonged absence 
of his friend, seems to have remonstrated with him 



212 HORACE 



somewhat sharply, and to have reminded him of 
the obligations which he had incurred. We have 
a perfect proof of the spirit of Horace in the reply * 
in which he firmly but courteously denies the right 
of his patron to abridge his stay in the country and 
order him back to Rome. He distinctly declares 
he will not return till the spring. " Your poet," 
he writes, " will come back, my kind friend, with 
the zephyrs and the first swallow." Even his Sa- 
bine farm would be bought too dear at the price of 
his independence. " Sooner than that," he boldly 

writes, — 

" I '11 give up all I have without a sigh." 

If a man finds his liberty in danger, his first duty is 
to secure it. No matter what he has gained by its 
sacrifice, — 

" When he finds out he 's changed his lot for worse, 
Let him betimes th' untoward choice reverse." 

Surely there never was a more manly declaration of 
the limits within which a patron's influence ought 
to be exercised, nor one more likely to endear its 
propounder to the land 

" Which sober-suited Freedom chose, — 
A land where, girt by friends or foes, 
A man may speak the thing he will." 

The dignity which Horace maintained in his re- 
lations with Maecenas was the more remarkable 
because dignity was not a virtue of his age, and 
because Maecenas does not appear to have been 
1 Epist. I. 7. 



ECCENTRICITY OF MAECENAS 213 

one of those happy natures with whom it is easy to 
live and difficult to quarrel. He is per- Eccentricity 
haps the most decidedly eccentric charac- of Maecenas. 
ter that meets us in Roman history. Though 
descended from Etruscan kings, and holding the 
first place in the confidence of the sovereign, he 
refused to accept any dignity, and lived and died 
a simple knight. Yet his contempt for honors 
and titles can hardly have arisen from exceptional 
strength of mind. There was one thing at which 
he trembled, and which many an ordinary man can 
meet with firmness, — death ; and, what is more 
singular, he was brave enough to own his tremors. 
Among the few verses of his that have come down 
to us, there are some half dozen glyconics which 
enshrine the most craven wail in which a man ever 
confessed his desire " to sweat and grunt under a 
weary life," — to cling to existence however insup- 
portable : — 

" Paralyzed in hand and thigh, 
Toothless, humpback'd, lame, 
Only bid me not to die, — 

Life is all I claim. 
Give me, powers above me, give, 
Be it on the rack, to live ! " 

Yet, though he thus recoiled from death, he was as 
indifferent as Lucretius to death's sequel. 

" No useless sepulchre I crave : 
Nature gives all her sons a grave," 

has been transmitted to us by Seneca as an ut- 
terance of Maecenas, who perhaps took a cynical 



214 HORACE 



pleasure in thus mocking the forlorn dignity of the 
great nobles whose ashes were stored in the urns 
that lined the Latin and Flaminian roads. 

The eccentricity of this Etruscan's literary style 
was so marked that Augustus gave the name of 
calamistri, or " curling pins," to his contorted 
phrases ; and similar singularities marked his life 
and conduct. His slovenly dress provoked the 
laughter of the passers-by ; and his quarrels and 
reconciliations with his wife Terentia were so 
incessant that Seneca said of him that he was 
married a thousand times, though he never had 
but one wife. It was the Etruscan eccentric who 
bought up the hideous purlieus of the Esquiline, — 
described by Horace as the haunt of obscene hags 
and desperate criminals, the place where slaves 
were buried and convicts executed, — and trans- 
formed them into those gardens which afterward 
became celebrated as containing the tower to which 
one emperor, Augustus, used to retire to recruit 
his failing health, and from which another, Nero, 
gazed on the spectacle of burning Rome. 

Such was the patron with whom Horace lived 
Horace and on terms of perfect equality and social 
botfrare friendliness ; and we leave our consider- 
types. ation of the poet's genius and character 

with the pleasant feeling that we have been con- 
templating two natures presenting each a type 
very uncommon in Augustan Rome, and both in 
a different way very attractive. It is a rare and 
an interesting sight to observe ability and real 



TWO RARE TYPES 215 

power despising the insignia of office and the rib- 
bons of court distinctions ; it is as pleasant and 
almost as rare to meet an honest, manly, cultured 
spirit in which genial friendliness, sound common 
sense, and refined self-respect are equally fused 
and mingled. Still seldomer and with still greater 
satisfaction do we witness a warm and manly 
friendship between two representatives of rare 
types, — a friendship equally creditable to both, 
that grew up naturally, and was only interrupted 
by death, which, strangely fulfilling a half-playful 
prophecy of the poet, claimed the two victims 
within one year. 



VII. 

LATIN SATIRE. 

There was a moment when the primitive sim- 
plicity and austerity of Roman life began 
source of to undergo a softening process, and to 
become polished by contact with Greece. 
This was the moment seized by Lucilius for the 
creation of what was in effect a new form of art. 
For, though saturae were written by Ennius and 
others, Lucilius really originated this form of com- 
position, so interesting because it is the narrow 
pedestal on which the Roman claim to originality, 
in the department of poetry at least, takes its 
stand. In prose Rome may claim to have been 
the first to have raised familiar correspondence 
to a branch of literature in which she is still 
unrivaled ; and she has certainly stamped her 
mark on history, and made jurisprudence altogether 
her own. In poetry she can claim nothing save 
satire ; but the boast of Quintilian, " Satira tota 
nostra est," is as just as are most of the utterances 
of that eminent critic. When Horace adverts to 
the affinity of satire to the Old Comedy of Greece, 
he makes an instructive literary comment ; but it 
would be a mistake to refer the origin of Latin 
satire to any such source. A still greater error 
would it be to connect it in any way with the 



RISE AND SOURCE OF SATIRE 2\J 

Greek satyric drama. Such a theory has been put 
forward, but one has only to read the " Cyclops " 
of Euripides to see that to the Latin satira and the 
Greek satyric drama there is nothing common but 
a fortuitous resemblance in sound between the 
names of two very different things. As the Greek 
drama, which is the mightiest product of the hu- 
man spirit, took its rise from the primitive worship 
of Dionysus, so the only form of art which the 
Latin mind struck out for itself had its birth in 
what was essentially an act of worship, the thanks- 
givings and rejoicings for the harvest-home, in the 
course of which the peasants of agricultural Italy 
bantered each other in rude Fescennine strains. 
To the Fescennine masque, no doubt, we are to 
look for the common source of comedy, of satire, 
and of pastoral amoebaean poetry. 

We do not know whether the interlocutors in the 
Fescennine dialogues spoke each in his own per- 
son, or assumed that of some one else, and so be- 
came actors on a petty scale. But we learn from 
Livy x that, in the consulship of C. Sulpicius and 
Licinius Stolo in 389, some Etruscan artists in an 
expiatory ceremony executed dances to the music 
of a flute, and thus gave the idea of a performance 
composed of mingled music and acting, and hence 
named " a medley," satitra. From this was devel- 
oped in one direction Latin comedy through the 
Atellane farce and the mime ; in the other, that 
medley of topics and metres with which Lucilius 
1 VII. 2. 



2l8 LATIN SATIRE 

lashed the town in those open letters to the public, 
which were very similar in scope to the modern 
weekly press. 

It is interesting to notice how Latin satire re- 
Relation produces some of the characteristic fea- 
pkysand 6 tures °f tne Atellane farce and the mime, 
mimes. which were offshoots from a common 

stem. From the latter it has taken its coarse- 
ness, from the former a tendency to hold up to 
ridicule provincial oddities. The favorite butts 
of Atellane raillery in the hands of Pomponius 
and Novius seem to have been municipal eccen- 
trics, as has been already observed in the first 
lecture. And the affectations of country magis- 
trates is a constant theme of Latin satire. These 
moved the mirth of Horace and his city friends on 
the journey to Brundisium, when they laughed at 
the decorations of the ex-clerk who was Praetor of 
Fundi, and who was so proud of his purple robe, 
his broad stripes, and his pan of coals. Persius 1 
ridicules one "who thinks himself somebody, for- 
sooth, because, once stuck up with provincial dig- 
nity, he has broken short half-pint measures offi- 
cially at Arretium." Juvenal, after describing the 
fall of Sejanus, 2 asks : — 

1 " Sese aliquem credens Italo quod honore supinus 

Fregerit heminas Arreti aedilis imquas." — I. 129. 

2 " Hujus qui trahitur praetextam sumere mavis, 

An Fidenarum Gabiorumque esse potestas, 
Et de mensura jus dicere, vasa minora 
Frangere, pannosus vacuis aedilis Ulubris ? " 

X. 99. 



ITS ORIGINALITY 219 

" Wouldst don the purple of that wretched corse, 
Or be the Mayor of Gabii or Fidenae, 
Give laws upon short measures, and smash up 
Pint pots below the statutable size, 
A ragged Aedile 'mid Ulubrae's wastes ? " 

One kind of satire is as old as human nature, 
and arises partly from a certain cruel 

x J Originality 

disposition to ridicule our fellows, partly of Latin 
from a sentiment of justice and a feel- 
ing that there should be a social tribunal before 
which to hale those whom the civil tribunal can- 
not reach, and partly even from a more or less 
sincere desire to improve society. But such feel- 
ings and beliefs may find expression in the drama, 
as they did in the Old Comedy at Athens, or in 
the newspaper press and the society novel, as 
they do at the present time. The one original 
feat of Latin poetry was to develop from the 
Fescennine allusion the versified letter to the pub- 
lic, which was unknown to Greek literature, and 
which has ever since given its distinctive char- 
acter to satire. Horace, whose literary judgments 
are seldom sound, erred in referring to the Old 
Attic Comedy the origin of satire ; Quintilian, 
who is seldom wrong, took the right view when he 
said, " Satire is all our own." This was the way 
which Rome chose in which to " hold the mirror 
up to Nature, to show Virtue her own feature, 
Scorn her own image, and the very age and body 
of the time his form and pressure." 

Horace himself, perhaps somewhat inconsist- 



220 LA TIN SA TIRE 

ently, recognizes the substantive character of Ro- 
man satire when he alludes to it as " a kind of 
poetry untouched by the Greeks." Yet that mar- 
velous people often came near to the idea of such 
a form of art. We can hardly recognize a nu- 
cleus of it, as some critics have clone, in the Ho- 
meric picture of Thersites, but the travesty called 
" Margites " Avas a nearer approach. The satiri- 
cal portraiture of various types of women under 
the figure of various brutes, the fox, the mare, and 
so forth, — by means of which Simonides of Amor- 
gos paved the way not only for the fierce denuncia- 
tions of Juvenal's Sixth Satire, but also for the 
Mrs. Nicklebies and Mrs. Proudies of our own 
day, — took a further step in the same direction. 
When Aristophanes figured Demos as an old im- 
becile led about by his flatterers, he was on the 
threshold of satire ; and the recently discovered 
mimes of Herondas want little but a freer form and 
more unity of purpose to make them such pictures 
of society as we have in Lucilius, Horace, Persius, 
and Juvenal. The " Characters " of Theophrastus 
present us only male portraits,- — a significant proof 
that the Greeks did not feel how powerful an 
instrument satire could be made. The Greek 
novelists actually turned their backs on the por- 
traiture of character, and quite failed to realize the 
opportunities presented by the novel to take up 
the work of satire, and enlist the interest which it 
always commands. 

The delight with which the Roman satirists 



DELIGHT OF THE ROMAN SATIRISTS 221 

approached their task finds full expression in Hor- 
ace and Persius. The former tells us : — 

"T is my delight to build the homely rhyme, 
Like that in which Lucilius lash'd his time." 

The latter exclaims, " This jape of mine, trumpery 
as it seems, I would not sell for any The Roman 
Iliad ; " 1 and though Persius kindly says joyed thS" 
that Horace's victims smile under his work - 
lash, and that Horace plays round the heart to | 
which he finds so ready an entrance, yet we, less * 
prejudiced, must admit that the Matinian bee can 
sting, and that Horace enjoys his mockery of the 
world at least as much as his successor and imitator. 
We read that when Lucan, who was by eight 
years the junior of Persius, was taken, 

J J Discrepant 

a very young man, to hear some poems estimates of 
of the satirist recited, he could not re- 
strain an exclamation. One would have been glad 
to know what this exclamation was, but unfor- 
tunately time has robbed us of it. Nothing re- 

1 " Hoc ridere meum tarn nil nulla tibi vendo Iliade." 
— I. 122. My quotations of Persius cannot be taken from 
any of his metrical translators, who are quite unsuccessful. 
They will come from the admirable prose version of Coning- 
ton, slightly remodeled occasionally, merely for the purpose 
of bringing out some point which I may desire to make, and 
which the translator naturally did not bring into prominence- 
Persius loses little by being rendered into prose, but his style 
has completely evaporated in the metrical versions which I 
have seen, especially in that of Gifford, who sometimes suc- 
ceeds well enough with Juvenal. 



222 LATIN SATIRE 

mains but a mere smudge in the manuscript of 
the biographer. 1 I must own that I think time 
has dealt kindly with the reputation of Lucan 
as a literary critic. If his exclamation had sur- 
vived, it would certainly have been quoted by one 
class of critics as a proof of Lucan' s utter blindness 
and obtuseness, though no doubt by another it 
would have been hailed as a new proof of the un- 
erring perspicacity of the future author of the 
"Pharsalia." For about the merits of no ancient 
author is opinion so sharply divided. Quintilian, 
indeed, has declared that " much real glory Persius 
earned by a single Avork ; " but after all this does 
not give us the actual opinion of the great critic 
himself. Glory may be real {vera) and yet not de- 
served. Persius was certainly admired enthusias- 
tically in the Middle Ages for his moral elevation, 
and the Fathers teem with quotations from his 
little book. But after the revival of learning he 
found few admirers save Casaubon, of whose edition 
of Persius Scaliger said that the sauce was better 
than the fish. Turnebus thought little of him, and 
Jerome threw his Satires into the fire. In modern 
times he has been edited oftener than estimated. 
To show that the question of his literary merit is 
not yet settled, I will cite two rival judgments by 
two eminent French critics, both characterized by 
the elegant pointedness and uncompromising de- 
cisiveness which the French school of criticism has 
made all its own. M. Constant Martha sees even 
1 Suetonius, Vita Persii. 



ESTIMATE OF PERSIUS 223 

in the tortuous obscurity of Persius the sacred 
gloom 6i some hallowed grove ; even when he de- 
spairs of catching his meaning, he regards his text 
with veneration and awe, and, quoting finely from 
Virgil, 1 exclaims in rapture : — 

" Surely a God is here : what God I know not." 

On the other hand, his eloquent fellow-country- 
man, M. Nisard, has protested that Persius spoiled 
the beautiful language in which he wrote by trying 
to say precietisement what had often before been 
said naturally but excellently well. Bad writing, 
he insists, comes from want of ideas. There can- 
not be a clear style if the thought is unformed and 
confused. Persius uses contortions of language to 
disguise the fact that he has nothing to say. If he 
gets anywhere a bit of gold, he is forced to beat 
it out thin ; for it will be long before he lights on 
another. Hence he is really verbose, while appar- 
ently conciseness itself ; diffuse and yet cramped 
to the verge of unintelligibility. The precision is 
only in his words, but it gives to his thoughts an 
appearance of virility which does not really belong 
to them. His gait is naturally short and tripping, 
but he rarely forgets that he ought to have a manly 
stride. He declares with Rosalind : — 

" We '11 have a swashing and a martial outside." 

But, while he poses, he reminds us of an old-fash- 
ioned child who is playing at being grown up. 

1 " Quis deus incertum est : habitat deus." 

Aeneid, VIII. 352, 



224 LATIN SATIRE 

If we consider only the vehicle which Persius has 
His style chosen for his fine and sometimes sublime 
and diction, thoughts, we must admit that we have in 
him an example of deliberate eccentricity and elab- 
orate tortuousness quite alien from the ancient 
world, and hardly to be paralleled even in the pres- 
ent age of recoil from simplicity, in which to have 
a style is to be consistently and invariably affected. 
It is a remarkable fact that in Roman literature we 
have only two Etruscans, Persius and Maecenas, 
and both are signalized by the willful obscurity and 
involution of their style. In the lecture on Horace 
I have already referred to the eccentricity of the 
life and character of Maecenas. This eccentricity 
invaded his literary style as well, and Augustus 
compared the tortuous phrases of his minister to 
curling-tongs {calamistri). But in this respect his 
fellow-countryman Persius altogether surpassed 
him. For instance, he wishes to say of a man that 
he is so greedy of gain that his mouth waters at 
the sight of gold : what he writes is, that he " gulps 
down Mercurial spittle;" 1 a phrase in which we 
can barely grasp at a shred of meaning if we re- 
member that Mercury was the god of treasure- 
trove, or unexpected gain. Again, " You are a 
good Stoic " is not a very recondite sentiment ; 
but how does he express it ? He must needs 
make a subtile allusion to the fact that the letter 
Y was a symbol in the Pythagorean philosophy, 
the stem standing for innocent childhood, and 

1 " Sorbere salivam Mercurialem." — V. in. 



PERSIUS' STYLE AND DICTION 22$ 

the divergent branches figuring the alternative 
paths of right and wrong presented to the choice 
of the responsible adult. How, then, does the 
simple thought, "You are a good Stoic," frame 
itself in words ? We have to remember that 
Pythagoras came from Samos, and that the Porch 
borrowed the Pythagorean letter to symbolize the 
divergent paths of right and wrong, and then we 
can just see how Persius persuaded himself that 
he had conveyed the sentiment, " You are a good 
Stoic," when he wrote down such a portentous ex- 
pression as " The letter which spread into Samian 
branches has pointed out to you the steep path 
which rises to the right." 2 In comparison with 
this, he is almost lucid when he speaks of philoso- 
phers "mumbling mad-dog silence and balancing 
words on the pivot of their shot-out lip ; " 2 or of 
" coins nursed at a modest five per cent till they go 
on to sweat a greedy eleven; " 3 or when he exclaims, 
" Oh that the grandeur of my rich uncle would 
boil over into a sumptuous funeral ; " 4 or describes 

1 " Et tibi quae Samios diduxit littera ramos, 

Surgentem dextro monstravit limite callem." 

III. 56. 

2 " Murmura cum secum et rabiosa silentia rodunt, 

Atque exporrecto trutinantur verba labello." 

III. 81. 

3 " Ut nummos quos hie quincunce modesto 

Nutrieras, pergant avidos sudare deunces." 

V. 149. 
4 " O si 
Ebulliat patruus, praeclarum funus ! " — II. 9. 



226 LA TIN SA TIRE 

students of the Old Comedy as " paling o'er indig- 
nant Eupolis and the grand old man." 1 Not many, 
probably, of the many admirers of Mr. Gladstone 
are aware that there was so ancient a claimant as 
Aristophanes of a name so familiar of late years in 
England. 

It will be a good study in the style of this young 

philosopher, who seems to have labored 

passages under a failing rife in our own literature 

how modi- n .. . 

fied by Per- at present, and to have been physically 
incapable of saying a plain thing in a 
plain way, if we examine the process to which he 
has subjected a few of the expressions which he 
has borrowed from Horace, and which have been 
brought together by M. Nisard. The older poet 2 
writes, " Men cry out that shame is extinct ; " 
this, expressed precieusement, becomes " The world 
has lost its forehead," 3 that being the supposed 
seat of shame. Horace 4 gives the excellent ad- 
vice to a tragic poet, " If you want me to weep, you 
yourself too must first feel sad ; " in Persius 5 
this is twisted into "He will weep who would 
have me bow'd down under his piteous tale." 
Horace talks of one who is like a perfect sphere 

1 " Iratum Eupolidem praegrandi cum sene palles." 

I. 124. 
2 "Clamant periisse pudorem." — Ep. II. 1. 80. 

3 "Exclamet Melicerta perisse 
Frontem de rebus." — V. 103. 

4 " Si vis me flere dolendum est 
Primum ipsi tibi." — A. P. 102. 

6 " Plorabit qui me volet incurvasse querella." ■ — I. 91. 



PERSIUS AND HORACE 227 

on the smooth surface of which no speck of dust 
can rest : : Persius' test of an elaborately perfect 
composition is that "every joining should spill 
o'er the smooth surface the critical nail," 2 that is, 
should allow the nail to pass over the surface as 
smoothly as if it were water. The idea of a joining 
shedding (or spilling) over it a critical nail seems 
quite worthy of being made the subject of an essay 
to be read before some of those societies which 
profess to explain expressions in modern poetry 
which have puzzled the authors of them. It pos- 
sesses all that " divine crookedness " and " holy 
awkwardness " which the cinquecettists claim for 
their favorite poets. These very epithets are ap- 
plied with pride (but, as it seems to me, quite with- 
out reason) to Dante Gabriel Rossetti in a recent 
eulogy on him by an aesthetic admirer. Too well 
has Persius described his own style when he speaks 
of the poet who " thumps his writing-desk and 
knows the taste of his bitten nails." 3 

But it is pleasant to leave the literary contor- 
tions of a young man who was a fit type Home ]ife 
of an age in which there was never less of Persms - 
originality, and never more teachers of the art of 
being original. Let us turn from the young rheto- 

1 " Totus teres atque rotundus 
Externi ne quid valeat per leve morari." 

Sat. II. 7. 86. 
2 " Ut per leve severos 
Effundat junctura ungues." — I. 64. 
8 " Pluteum caedit . . . demorsos sapit ungues." — I. 106. 



228 LATIN SATIRE 

rician, whose style was tortured into such fantastic 
convolutions by the curling-tongs of Virginius Fla- 
vius and Remmius Palaemon, to the precocious 
philosopher whose gentle nature expanded under 
the influences of a cultured home circle, and friends 
like Cornutus and the truly noble Thrasea. Persius 
is chiefly interesting as the enthusiastic disciple of 
a philosophy in which under the Roman Empire 
the human conscience sought and found an asylum. 
Stoicism had now ceased to be a philosophy, and 
had become a religion, appealing to the rich 
and great as Christianity appealed to the poor 
and humble. On assuming the garb of manhood, 
Persius threw himself at once into the arms of 
Cornutus, and perhaps his confession of his own 
distrust of himself and lively personal devotion to 
the Stoic philosopher is the least affected passage 
to be found in his work : — 

" When first the guardianship of the purple ceased to awe 
me, and the boss of boyhood was hung up as an offering to 
the quaint old household gods, while my toga of manhood 
yet unsoiled left me free to cast my eyes at will over the 
whole Saburra; when the way of life begins to be uncertain, 
and the bewildered mind finds that its ignorant ramblings 
have brought it to a point where roads branch off, — then it 
was that I made myself your adopted child, Cornutus. You 
at once received the young foundling into the bosom of 
a second Socrates. Anon your rule with artful surprise 
straightens the moral twist that it detects, and my spirit 
becomes moulded by reason, struggles to be subdued, and 
assumes plastic features under your hand. Ay, I mind well 
how I used to wear away long summer suns with you, and 
with you pluck the early bloom of the night for feasting. 



HOME LIFE OF PERSIUS 229 

We twain have one work and one set time for rest, and the 
enjoyment of a moderate table unbends our gravity. No, I 
would not have you doubt that there is a fixed law that 
brings our lives into accord, and one star that guides them." 1 

The Stoics did not seek to soften their teaching. 
The society in which Persius grew up is described 
by his biographer as one of high and hard think- 
ing (acriter pJiilosophantium), — a society having 
what would now be called a Puritanical bias, and 
an aversion for the court, its morals and ambitions. 
A notable figure in this set was Cornutus, who 
owed his banishment to an uncourtier-like reply 
to the emperor, which I confess seems to me to 
have been not only rude, but silly. The story goes 
that Nero had formed a design of writing a history 
of Rome in verse, and was desirous of learning the 
opinions of his friends as to the length to which 
the poem should run. " At least four hundred 
books," suggested his courtiers with one voice. 
Cornutus, being consulted, opined that no one 
would read a work so voluminous. " But," retorted 
the courtiers, " has not your master Chrysippus 
written as many or more ? " " True," said Cornu- 
tus, "but they are of use to the world." I own I 
think that any history of any place, even though it 
should be by an emperor and in verse, would have 
a better chance of doing good to humanity than 
such precepts as those which Cicero has culled 
from Chrysippus in his speech for Murena, — pre- 
cepts such as, " The wise man ought never to par- 
1 V. 30 ff. 



230 LA TJX SATIRE 

don any fault in another, and never to repent of 
any sin of his own ; " " All faults are equal, and it 
is as criminal to kill a chicken needlessly as to 
murder your father;" "The wise man is beauti- 
ful though he be a hunchback, rich though he be 
dying of want, a king though he be your slave." I 
think the four hundred books of Nero's poem could 
hardly have contained any less useful propositions 
than these. 

Another member of this coterie was Caesius 
Bassus, who is said to have edited the poet's 
work after his untimely death, and of whom we 
know nothing else except that Ouintilian has pro- 
nounced him the only one of his age whom he 
could think of putting in comparison with Horace 
as a lyric poet. But by far the noblest of his asso- 
ciates, and the most inspiring, more by example 
than precept, was the heroic Thrasea, " in whose 
person," says Tacitus, " Nero tried to murder Vir- 
tue herself." Probably Persius had him before 
his mind when he wrote the noble curse on tyrants, 
" Let them look on Virtue and die of the thought 
that they have lost her forever." 1 At Thrasea's 
house the young poet met Arria, the wife of the 
philosopher, and the daughter of the heroic Arria, 
who plucked the sword from her bleeding breast 
and handed it to her husband with the words, " I 
feel no pain but from the blow you are going to 
deal to yourself." Such a woman knew how a 
Stoic should die at a tyrant's behest, and knew 

1 " Virtutem videant intabescantque relicta/' — III. 38. 



ITS EFFECT ON HIS WRITINGS 23 1 

how to lift philosophy from the ridicule to which 
the paradoxes of Chrysippus exposed it. The short 
life of the poet was spent in the bosom of religious 
and aristocratic families, in which women were 
beginning to be able to exert their influence for 
good, as Agrippina and Messallina exercised theirs 
for evil. The only weakness of the whole society 
was a thirst for fame, " that last infirmity of noble 
minds." "The last weakness," says Tacitus, "of 
which even the sage divests himself is the love 
of glory." 1 

If we think of Persius, brought up in this refined 
atmosphere, young, very handsome, deli- Its effect on 
cate, admired for his character as well as hlswritln s s - 
for his talents, kept far from the contact of vice 
not only by the natural elevation of his character, 
but also by his physical weakness, surrounded by 
high-souled and admiring women, and utterly inex- 
perienced in life, we may well expect that his work 
will be something peculiar and rare ; and we are not 
disappointed. We find in him the roughness and 
spiritual brusqueness of one who broods much in 
solitude ; the obscurity of one who speaks but for 
his own circle, which will understand what is only 
half said ; the exaggerations of a neophyte who 
looks out at an unknown world from a Stoic clois- 
ter, — in a word, we find the creed of a coterie set 
forth with more dry light than tempting fruit, a 
catechism of Stoicism which is in equal parts the 

1 " Etiam sapientibus cupido gloriae novissima exuitur." 

Hist. IV. 6. 



232 LATIN SATIRE 

poetical exercise of a too painstaking and quite 
over-taught pupil of rhetoricians and grammarians, 
and the confession of faith of an aristocratic and 
high-minded but very limited society. 1 Persius 
was a conspicuously pure and good young man, 
who took his knowledge of vice from books, and 
who was only the versifier of a philosophical sys- 
tem which commanded his sincere intellectual as- 
sent, but did not inspire his heart and soul, as 
Epicureanism inspired the heart and soul of Lu- 
cretius. Hence Persius is not a good hater like 
/ Juvenal, though he says of himself that he " wears 
the grin of a petulant spleen." 2 The only class 
His Phiiis- which seem able to make him lose his 
tmes. temper are the officers of the army. It 

was no doubt because they encouraged discontent 
with the military regime that Domitian banished 
the philosophers from the city ; and, indeed, from 
the Stoic porch was most likely to emerge anything 
that was left of the spirit of old Rome, — all who 
dared to band themselves against tyranny, and did 
not fear to die. Hence we find Persius so far for- 
getting the sweet reasonableness of a philosopher 
as to apply such a Carlylian epithet as " unsavory " 
(Jiircosas) to the centurions. One might fancy the 
epithet to be more applicable to the ragged philos- 
opher with flowing, uncombed beard, who "mum- 

1 M. Constant Martha, Les Moralistes, p. 123. He further 
describes his entourage as a company of Jansenists, a kind 
of Roman Port Royal waging incessant war with the court. 

2 " Sum petulanti splene cachinno." — I. 12. 



SUBJECTS OF PERSIUS' SATIRES 233 

bles mad-dog silence " in a passage already quoted. 
The centurions represent to Persius the class most 
opposed to his teachings, and are to him what the 
world is to the Puritan, the bourgeoisie to the beau 
monde, the Philistine to Culture. 

The literary ideas of Persius are much colored 
by his age. When the suppression of subjects of 
political eloquence carried in its train a hls Satires - 
general decline in the higher walks of literature, 
poetry was encouraged by the court, and hence 
that " itch for the pen " (scribendi cacoethes) of 
which Juvenal, too, complained. Persius ridicules 
in the first Satire the popularity of the poet, his 
affectation of archaism, and his unceasing struggle 
to attain to the sublime, " something in the grand 
style to come from the heart with mighty gusts of 
breath ; ,fl but he is happiest when he is dealing 
with the incompetence of the critic, — a theme 
which possesses in every age an irresistible charm 
for the literary aspirant. His religious thoughts 
are put forward in the second Satire, " On Prayer." 
They are protests against that kind of religion 
which treats the gods as persons with whom a 
bargain may be struck, or who might even be 
made accomplices in crime, or at least accesso- 
ries after the fact. His teaching broadly resem- 
bles that which the Hebrew Prophet 2 sums up in 
the words, " I desired mercy, and not sacrifice ; 

1 " Grande ali quid quod pulmoanimae praelargusanhelet." 

I. 14. 

2 Hosea vi. 6. 



234 LA TIN SA TIRE 

and the knowledge of God more than burnt offer- 
ings ; " and we cannot but recall "Ho, every one 
that thirsteth, come ye to the waters," 1 when he 
bursts into an impassioned appeal to the world to 
come and eat of the corn of Cleanthes. " From 
this," he cries, " seek ye all, old and young, a limit 
for your desires, a provision for the sorrows of 
old age." 2 Persius beseeches his contemporaries 
to live in the use of prayers to which all may listen. 
Christ told his followers not to court the observa- 
tion of men, but to seek the throne of God from 
their closets. But the worshiper to whom Per- 
sius spoke sought his closet, not from unostenta- 
tious humility, but because he blushed to disclose 
to man the vile proposals which he made to his 
god : " Grant me the death of my rich uncle or my 
sickly ward ; look at Nerius with his third wife : 
grant this, and all my due observances will never 
fail." "If you made such a proposal," says Persius, 
" to the most unworthy of your acquaintance, he 
would cry shame on you : and what do you think 
Jupiter will say ? " 3 In one place the Satirist falls 
into an implied limitation of the omnipotence of 
Heaven. The gourmand prays for health, "but 
rich dishes and thick gravies forbid the gods to 

1 Isaiah lv. I. 

2 " Juvenum purgatas inseris aures 
Fruge Cleanthea. Petite hinc puerique senesque 
Finem animo certum miserisque viatica canis." 

V. 63. 
8 II. 9-23. 



CHRISTIAN TONE OF PERSIUS 235 

grant it, and lay a veto on Jupiter himself." 1 One 
is reminded of the Irish judge who on reading a 
Fenian proclamation, was heard to remark, "Ay, 
God save Ireland ; that 's the way they always 
begin ; and that 's the very thing they are making 
it downright impossible for Him to do." 

The Christian tinge of some of the expressions 
of Persius has been noticed, as for in- His chris- 
stance in " this sinful flesh " (scelei'ata tian tone - 
pulpa). It is extremely unlikely that Persius bor- 
rowed these from Christian writers, and far more 
probable that both he and the Christian writers 
adopted them from the philosophy of the time. 
But certainly the whole tone of some passages in 
Persius is eminently Christian : — 

" Give we to the gods such offerings as great Messalla's 
blear-eyed son cannot give, be his dish never so ample, — 
duty to God and man well blended in the mind, purity in 
the heart's shrine, and a bosom full of the inbred nobility of 
goodness ; let me have these to take to the temples, and a 
handful of meal will justify me in the eyes of Heaven." 2 

Such doctrine as this is startling in its original- 
ity in a pagan philosopher, and would strike us still 

1 " Sed grandes patinae tuccetaque crassa 

Adnuere his Superos vetuere Jovemque morantur." 

II.42. 

2 " Quin damus id Superis, de magna quod dare lance 

Non possit magni Messallae lippa propago : 
Compositum jus fasque animo, sanctosque recessus 
Mentis, et incoctum generoso pectus honesto : 
Haec cedo ut admoveam templis et farre litabo." 

II. 71. 



236 LATIN SATIRE 

more powerfully, were it not that Christianity has 
made such teachings as familiar to us as household 
words during all the ages which separate us from 
the time of Persius. 

The morality of Persius is, as a rule, simply that 
of Stoicism, — the Stoic war against the 

His ethics. . . 

passions, love, ambition, luxury. .But he 
adds something to it when he expresses his craving 
after true liberty. The fifth Satire has a fine de- 
scription of true liberty as distinguished from that 
merely material freedom which Dama can get from 
the praetor's wand : — 

" The thing we want is Freedom, not that by which every 
new recruit for citizenship enlisting in the Veline tribe gets 
a quota of spoiled corn for his ticket. What a pinchbeck 
age, when a single twirl makes a citizen of Rome ! Look at 
Dama, a stable slave not worth twopence, blear-eyed from 
low tippling, and ready to tell a lie about a single feed of 
corn. Let his master give him a turn, and, presto ! by the 
mere act of twirling he is converted into Marcus Dama. 
Prodigious ! What ! Marcus surety, and you refuse to lend 
money ? Marcus judge, and you feel uneasy ? Marcus has 
given his word : it is so. Pray, Marcus, witness this docu- 
ment." 1 

This is the liberty the praetor's wand can give. 
The liberty that is of Stoicism and the spirit is far 
higher and far harder to achieve. And — worse 
still — the world wants it not, and will not don the 
Phrygian cap : — 

" Talk in this way among the varicose centurions, and 
huge Pulfenius breaks into a horse laugh, and says he would 

1 v. 73-81. 



JUVENAL AND PERSIUS CONTRASTED 237 

not give a clipped centussis for a hundred of your Greek phi- 
losophers." 1 

The last really weighty utterance of Persius is 
the expression of his conviction that the spiritual 
condition of the Philistine is desperate. 

Juvenal offers in many ways a marked contrast 
to Persius, though the two are so often , , 

" Juvenal and 

coupled together in editions, lectures, Persius con- 
and histories of literature. The latter 
was of noble family ; began to write his satires 
when little more than a boy ; and died before he 
had reached his twenty-eighth year. The former, 
the adopted (if not the real) son of a freedman, 
spent all his life up to past middle age in decla- 
mation ; in urging Sulla to go into private life ; or 
bidding Hannibal to think what a blessed thing 
it would be to pass his life in the advocacy of 
platitudes and die a good old man ; or taking a 
part in resolving some of those hard cases which, 
Quintilian tells us, were devised to exercise the 
powers of rival declaimers. Juvenal probably did 
not compose anything, except mere rhetorical exer- 
cises, until he had reached twice the age at which 
Persius died, and did not publish until he was an 
old man. Again, Persius was a philosopher and 
nothing but a philosopher, while Juvenal belongs 
to no sect, and says that the only difference be- 

1 " Dixeris haec inter varicosos centuriones, 
Continuo crassum ridet Pulfenius ingens, 
Et centum Graecos curto centusse licetur." — V. 189. 



238 LATIN SATIRE 

tween the Stoics and the Cynics is in their tunics. 
Lastly, while the literary position of Persius is still 
in the scales of criticism, and his claims to the 
name of poet are denied as stoutly as they are af- 
firmed, the dazzling magnificence of Juvenal's lan- 
guage, his strength which is sometimes fairly bru- 
tal, and his scathing fury of invective, have silenced 
criticism and drowned the voice of protest. The 
arrows of his speech, headed and winged with 
flame, have so fierce a flight that they mock the 
eye which strains itself after them. The flood of 
indignation, pent up in furious silence for forty 
years, once loose carried away on its current or 
tossed aside every obstacle that impeded its onward 
rush. 

While the literary merits of Juvenal are far 
beyond and above criticism, — for who can call 
these in question who has not utterly forgotten the 
amazement with which he first read the eighth, 
tenth, and thirteenth Satires ? — yet there are 
questions about certain qualities in his work which 
invite and have often provoked discussion. 

Was Juvenal a satirist in the truest sense of the 
in what word ? Did he really abhor the vices 
Juvenal? which he lashed, or was he like the rich 
satirist? man j n h} s own sa tire, who looked on 
with pleasure at the burning of his house, because 
he knew that it would be to him in the end a 
source of profit ? Did he regard the smouldering 
fires which were eating away the heart of old 
Rome with the pleasure with which Nero contem- 



JUVENAL AS A SATIRIST 239 

plated the flames that preyed upon her streets and 
colonnades ? Did Juvenal congratulate himself 
that there was such an abundant harvest for him 
to reap ? Does the fearful realism with which he 
depicts vice show the extreme of fervid abhor- 
rence, or a secret pruriency and pleasure in dwell- 
ing on the details ? Some of these questions are 
such as could only be tried in camera, and fortu- 
nately we are not bound to be the judges. We 
cannot get much good now out of fierce invectives 
against vices which do not allure but only disgust, 
and which, we may fairly say, have died with the 
Roman Empire. But we may well feel that it 
would have been better if some of his satires had 
never been written. Though he has given us the 
noble sentiment that there is no debt so sacred 
as that which we owe to the purity of the young, 1 
yet no writer has more freely outraged modesty, or 
done so with more apparent gusto. 2 

1 " Maxima debetur puero reverentia : si quid 

Turpe paras, ne tu pueri contempseris annos." — XIV. 47. 

2 From this point of view M. Gaston Boissier is the most 
formidable assailant of the character of Juvenal. Professor 
Mayor has put the rebutting case strongly and brilliantly in 
the advertisement to his edition of 1886, but I must confess 
myself unable to accept his conclusions, that " from the first 
page to the last breathes one spirit of homely manhood," and 
that " his standard is that of the Gospels and of St. Paul." 
Professor Mayor admits that there is at least one passage 
(XI. 1 86-1 89) to which a virtuous motive cannot be ascribed. 
It is hard to resist the feeling that there are many such 
passages, which betray a desire to dwell on impure topics, 
rather than to show up the ugliness of vice. 



240 LATIN SATIRE 



The little we know about his life does not afford 
much material for building up the poet's 

His life. ° - 1 

character from his environments, — al- 
ways a hazardous attempt. He saw eleven emper- 
ors, — from Claudius to Hadrian, — but probably 
he began to write only under Domitian, and to 
publish under Hadrian. The most important fact 
which we learn from his biographer is, that he spent 
much of his life in oratorical exercises, though 
he did not become a professional advocate, — in 
declaiming for declaiming's sake. Under Domi- 
tian he wrote some verses on a favorite actor, 
Paris. These verses, when published under Ha- 
drian, were thought to reflect on another popu- 
lar artist of that day, and they brought about his 
fall. The court paid back the satirist in his own 
coin by giving the octogenarian scoffer the com- 
mand of a legion in Africa, an ironical recognition 
of misapplied ability, which really amounted to a 
sentence of exile. 

" Easy," cries Juvenal, "is Democritus' smile of 
His attitude derision, but where did Heraclitus, the 
toward vice. wee p m g philosopher, find tears enough 
for the folly of man ? " Yet Juvenal himself has a 
far larger supply of tears and indignation than of 
laughter and gibes. He is always in a rage, and a 
laugh seems to sit strangely on his lips. 1 But his 

1 Dr. Johnson said that the peculiarity of Juvenal was a 
mixture of gaiety and stateliness, but his gaiety is never 
more than a slight and momentary relaxation of his prevail- 
ing sternness. " Raro jocos,"' observes Lipsius, "saepius 



JUVENAL S ATTITUDE TOWARD VICE 24 1 

furious indignation against vice seems to have had 
its source rather in the head than in the heart. 
He. is like the lion in Homer that lashes his sides 
with his tail, "and mightily stirreth him up to 
fight." Perhaps it may be urged that, if he really 
thought 

" Vice is a monster of such hideous mien," 

he would not have taken such pains to paint her 
every feature in colors that will never fade ; nor 
would he, perhaps, have been so intimate with 
Martial ; nor would that poet have addressed to 
him three epigrams, two of which contain gross 
and irrelevant impurities. Nor yet would he, if 
his hatred of vice had been as real as it seems, 
have laughed in his sleeve at his own fervor, and 
wound up an impassioned invective with a sneer, 
as when he ends the catalogue of Nero's crimes 
and his comparison with the matricide Orestes by 
saying that Orestes never sung on the stage or 
wrote a Troica. In some cases, so artificial is the 
passion into which he has worked himself that he 
seems completely to forget its existence for a 
moment. The act of cannibalism at Ombi in 
Egypt described in the fifteenth. Satire is the oc- 
casion of a good deal of "fine frenzy," and many 
beautiful verses and pathetic passages, such as — 

acerbos sales miscet." It is with a sympathetic pen that he 
portrays the moody and saturnine cynicism of Domitian in 
the tale of the Council of the Turbot, so matchlessly told in 
the fourth Satire. 



242 LATIN SATIRE 

" But serpents now more links of concord bind : 
The cruel leopard spares the spotted kind ; " 1 

and — 

" Nature, who gave us tears, by that alone 
Proclaims she made the feeling heart our own ; 
And 't is her noblest boon : this bids us fly 
To wipe the drops from sorrowing friendship's eye, 
Sorrowing ourselves ; to wail the prisoner's state, 
And sympathize in the wrong'd orphan's fate, 
Compell'd his treacherous guardian to accuse, 
While many a shower his blooming cheek bedews, 
And through his scatter'd tresses, wet with tears, 
A doubtful face, or boy*s or girl's, appears. 
As Nature bids, we sigh when some bright maid 
Is ere her spousals to the pyre convey'd ; 
Some babe by fate's inexorable doom 
Just shown on earth and hurried to the tomb." 2 

But all this beautiful writing leads up to the in- 
credibly frigid question, what would Pythagoras 

1 " Sed jam serpentum major concordia: parcit 
Cognatis maculis similis fera." — 159. 

2 " Mollissima corda 
Humano generi dare se Natura fatetur 
Quae lacrimas dedit ; haec nostri pars optima sensus : 
Plorare ergo jubet casum lugentis amici, 
Squaloremque rei, pupillum ad jura vocantem 
Circumscriptorem, cujus manantia fletu 
Ora puellares faciunt incerta capilli. 
Naturae imperio gemimus cum funus adultae 
Virginis occurrit, vel terra clauditur infans 
Et minor igne rogi." — 131. 

I avail myself of the spirited version of Gifford when it is 
not too diffuse. Sometimes I modify it, or attempt a version 
of my own, where the usually vigorous rendering of Gifford 



JUVENAL A PREACHER 243 

have thought of cannibalism ? — Pythagoras, who 
abstained from all meat, and did not even treat 
himself to every kind of vegetable ! How strangely 
and suddenly the fire of indignation has gone out ! 
Moreover, furious though he always appears to be, 
there is method in the madness which announces 
in the very first Satire that he will assail only those 
whose ashes fill the funeral urns which line the 
Flaminian and Latin roads. 1 

Vice may be lashed from the pulpit or the stage. 
Horace, of whom Quintilian says that he j UV enai a 
was without a rival in his sketches of P reacher > 
character, chose the methods of the stage. Juve- 
nal was driven back chiefly on the resources of 
the pulpit when he made the resolution that his 
puppets should only represent the dead. Not that 
it made much difference. Society in the time of 
Horace was decaying, in the time of Juvenal was 
rotten to the core. If Juvenal had attacked the 
living, it may be doubted whether he would have 
done them much good, while it is certain that he 
would have done himself much harm. It would 

seems either to misrepresent the meaning of the text, or to 
wander too far from the sentiment. 

1 When he refers to persons still living, they are either 
quite obscure and therefore not formidable, like Machaera 
the auctioneer (VII. 9), or Basilus the pleader (VII. 145), or 
else men once powerful but subsequently disgraced or exiled, 
such as Marius Priscus (I. 41, VIII. 120). Of the deceased 
objects of his satire, most are taken from the reigns of Nero 
and Domitian. The freedmen come from the reign of Clau- 
dius. 



244 LATIN SATIRE 

be a mistake to credit Juvenal with any heroic in- 
dependence in spite of his brave words. " What a 
fine contumacy and fearless boldness of speech ! " 
we are disposed to exclaim when we meet the furi- 
ous verses which tell how Domitian, 

" drunk with fury, tore 
The prostrate world which bled at every pore, 
And Rome beheld in body as in mind 
A bald-pate Nero rise again to curse mankind." 1 

But we must remember that attacks on dead 
but not a emperors were not attended with any 
martyr. appreciable danger in Juvenal's time. 

Though the Caesars, as long as they all belonged 
to the one Caesarean house, resented unfavorable 
criticism on deceased princes, yet we know that 
even then poets referred with eulogy to the open 
enemies of the founder of the Empire. How often 
has Cato been glorified by Virgil, Horace, Lucan, 
even Seneca, the minister of Nero ! But in the 
time of Juvenal, to traduce a dead emperor was 
sometimes the best road to the favor of the living 
wearer of the purple. Pliny's Panegyric on Trajan 
is a detailed indictment of his predecessors. The 
most acceptable offering to Domitian was the 
wounded name of those who reigned before him. 
The successors to the Twelve Caesars who came 
to the throne through adoption or election set up 
the claim that they had restored the liberty of the 
ancient regime. Pliny compares Trajan to the 

1 " Cum jam semianimum laceraret Flavius orbem 
Ultimus, etcalvo serviret Roma Neroni." — IV. 37. 



JUVENAL NOT A MARTYR 245 

Brutus who drove the kings from Rome. Attacks, 
moreover, on despots were the licensed and char- 
tered themes of declamation. Juvenal tells us that 
he, too, had in his salad days given advice to Sulla 
to retire into private life, and draws a moving pic- 
ture of the poor teacher of rhetoric ready to expire 
with weariness while a droning class does to death 
inhuman tyrants. 1 Philostratus of Lemnos met 
Aelian, a Roman sophist, with a book in his hand, 
which he was reading with great apparent satis- 
faction. Being asked what it was, " It is," said 
Aelian, " a furious attack on the tyrant lately slain, 
whom I have dubbed Gymnis, to indicate the 
profligacy by which he has disgraced the Roman 
name." " If you had accused him in his lifetime," 
said Philostratus, " I should have admired you. 
A man was needed to smite a living tyrant ; any 
coward could trample on his corse." 

Decidedly the most astonishing quality in the 
style of Juvenal is his amazing faculty His pictur- 
for suggesting a picture to the mind. esc i ueness - 
Let us observe how his fancy ever dips its wings in 
all the hues of the rainbow, and turns descriptions 
into pictures. The poet has to say, " after the vic- 
tory of Marius over the Cimbri," but the reader 
must be made to think of the huge stature of these 
northern warriors, and of the terrible slaughter of 
Vercellae, and so we have, not words, but a word- 
picture : — 

1 " Cum perimit saevos classis numerosa tyrannos." 

VII. 151. 



246 LATIN SATIRE 

"When carrion crows flocked to the Cimbrian slain, 
Crows that had never rifled huger corses.' 1 ] 

Was there ever a more hideous portrait than that 
in the sixth Satire of a Jezebel who seeks in vain, 
by paints and cosmetics, to repair the ravages of 
time ? — 

" But tell me this : this thing thus daub'd and oil'd, 
Thus poulticed," plaster'd, baked by turns and boil'd, 
This thing veneer'd and vamp'd and lacquerd o'er — 
Is it a face, Ursidius, or a sore ? " 2 

We see the very race-course itself when we read of 
the winning horse, — 

" Under whose flying feet 
Dances the foremost whorl of trampled dust." 3 

And what pencil or brush could more vividly bring 
before our eyes the famished and mangy hound 
that 

" Licks the dry lamp for but a drop of oil " ? 4 

1 " Postquam ad Cimbros stragemque volabant, 
Qui nunquam attigerant majora cadavera corvi." 

VIII. 251. 

2 " Sed quae mutatis inducitur atque fovetur 
Tot medicaminibus, coctaeque siliginis offas 
Accipit et madidat, fades dicetur an ulcus? " 

VI. 471. 
3 " Cujus 
Clara fuga ante alios et primus in aequore ftulvis" 

VIII. 60. 
4 " Canibus pigris scabieque vetusta 
Levibus et siccae lambentibus ora lucernae." 

VIII. 35. 



JUVENAL S PICTURESQUENESS 247 

A part of his terrible indictment of old age may be 
quoted ; the rest is too horrible : — 

" The face a parody of its former self, 
Instead of skin a hideous hide, and cheeks 
That flaccid hang, networks of lines and wrinkles 
Such as in Tabraca's woods the grandam ape 
Sitting at squat scrapes on her leathern jowl. 
Between the young there 's many a difference, 
Some comelier, some stronger; but the old! 
The old are all the same, the piping voice, 
The tottering limbs, the hairless head, the nose 
Drivelling, — babyhood is come again." Y 

For Juvenal every conception clothes itself with 
color and shape. He cannot think of Hannibal 
without fancying what a picture would be the one- 
eyed general borne on his Gaetulian beast. 2 Ma- 
rius comes before his mind's eye as stepping 
down from the car that bore him in triumph for 
Aquae Sextiae, 3 and Vulcan as washing the grime 

1 " Deformem et tetrum ante omnia vultum 

Dissimilemque sui, deformem pro cute pellem 
Pendentesque genas, et tales adspice rugas 
Quales, umbriferos ubi pandit Tabraca saltus, 
In vetula scalpit mater jam simia bucca. 
Plurima sunt juvenum discrimina : pulchrior ille 
Hoc, atque ille alio : multum hie robustior illo : 
Una senum f acies, cum voce trementia membra, 
Et jam leve caput, madidique infantia nasi." 

X. 191. 

2 " O qualis facies et quali digna tabella, 

Cum Gaetula ducem portaret bellua luscum." 

X. 157. 
8 " Cum de Teutonico vellet descendere curru." 

X. 282. 



248 LATIN SATIRE 

of his Liparaean workshop from his brawny 
arms. 1 

Juvenal would have been more than human if 
Defects aris- the possession of such marvelous powers 
mg from it. Q £ description had not sometimes led 
him astray. And sure enough we find that some 
of his most graphic tableaux, however matchless 
for power, are irrelevant where they are introduced, 
and have the worst fault that an illustration could 
have, — the fault of not illustrating. Nothing, for 
instance, could surpass his well-known picture of 
the fall of Sejanus, and the comments thereon in 
Rome. 2 But does it illustrate the vanity of human 
wishes ? Not, except in so far as every reverse of 
fortune in history may be said broadly to exemplify 
the theme. It would rather serve to illustrate a 
proposition unfortunately not always true, and less 
true perhaps in Juvenal's age than in any other, 
that a life of the blackest infamy is likely to issue 
in disaster. Sejanus was no doubt ambitious, but 
he was also a villain without a redeeming trait. To 
quote his fall as an instance of 

" Vaulting ambition that o'erleaps itself 
And falls o' the other," 

would be like citing as an instance of Sabbath- 
breaking an atrocious murder perpetrated on Sun- 

1 " Tergens 
Brachia Vulcanus Liparaea nigra taberna." 

XIII. 44. 
2 X. 56-97- 



DEFECTS IN JUVENAL 249 

day, or condemning as want of punctuality a sol- 
dier's desertion on the eve of battle. 

Another defect, arising from his very brilliancy, 
is that hyperbole with which Boileau charged him, 
and which makes him, in the words of Horace, 
" assail with the terrible knout offenses worthy 
only of the light cane." For instance, in dealing 
with the nobility in the eighth Satire, he pursues 
with mingled curses and tears the theme of " How 
are the mighty fallen ! " There is nothing new in 
this subject, which was indeed one of the common- 
places of rhetoric and philosophy. Sallust handles 
it finely in the speeches of Memmius and of Marius 
in the " Jugurthine War ; " and Seneca had already 
said, " Nobility does not lie in a hall full of family 
portraits dimmed by the hand of Time." There is 
nothing peculiar to Juvenal's work save its amaz- 
ing brilliancy. But the vials of his wrath contain 
no tempered liquor, and they cannot be poured 
out drop by drop. Hence the unmeasured and 
unproportioned fury of the satirist. Hence the 
furious diatribe against Damasippus, the " ostler- 
consul," 2 who with his own hands drives his horses 

1 " Ipse rotam astringit sufflamine mulio consul." — VIII. 148. 

This is the recent and certain emendation of the verse, 
which has hitherto stood : — 

" Ipse rotam astringit multo sufflamine consul." 

No doubt mulio was originally misread multo, and then 
multo was placed before sufflamine for the sake of the metre. 
Mulio consul at once makes a weak line thoroughly worthy 
of Juvenal. The emendation is due to Biicheler, who elicited 



250 LATIN SATIRE 



past the ashes of the mighty dead, his ancestors : 
the Sun, fortunately, sees him not, but the Moon, 
the Moon looks down on the abominable thing, 
and the fires of Heaven bend on it their attesting 
eyes. The ostler-consul's crime of taking the place 
of his coachman is put beside forgery and adultery, 
and is one of those before which 

" The lofty pride of every honor'd name 
Shall rise to vindicate insulted fame, 
And hold aloft the torch to blazon forth its shame." * 

We must make allowance for the strange potency 
of Roman gravitas, and we must remem- 

Roman d 

traits in ber that Tacitus, as well as Juvenal, tells 

Juvenal. 

how Nero sang on the stage, in a tone 
only a little less awful than that in which he nar- 
rates his incest and matricide. We must recall, 
too, the indignant protest of Laberius, in republi- 
can Rome, when Julius Caesar compelled him to 
take part in one of his own mimes. But when 
every allowance is made which far different times 
and circumstances can suggest, we cannot help 
feeling that in this passage Juvenal is breaking a 
butterfly on the wheel, and violating by exaggera- 
tion, which however eloquent is certainly excessive, 
the fundamental canons of sober art. 

it from the note of the scholiast and the " Florilegium San- 
gallense." It has been heartily accepted by Professor 
Mayor and all the editors. 

1 " Incipit ipsorum contra te stare parentum 

Nobilitas, claramque facem praeferre pudendis." 

VIII. 138. 



ROMAN TRAITS IN JUVENAL 25 I 

Another curiously Roman trait is his indigna- 
tion against the patrician gladiators, when set be- 
side his apparent tolerance of the bloody sports of 
the circus. Pliny, it is true, congratulates Trajan 
on the revival of the spectacles ; but Cicero, more 
than a century before the time of Juvenal, had con- 
demned the games, and Seneca had uttered the 
fine sentiment, " Man's life to man is sacred." 1 
Juvenal finds nothing shocking in the lavish sacri- 
fice of human life. It is not human blood, but 
patrician blood, which is sacred in his eyes. What 
shocks him is that the gladiator is a patrician, noble, 
and (worst of all) that he chooses, not the part of 
the mirmillo or assailant, but that of the retiarins, 
or lasso-man, who seeks to baffle his armed adver- 
sary by casting a net over his head. And why is 
this so shocking ? Because the mirmillo s face was 
covered, but as retiarius the noble gladiator dis- 
played his patrician features to the gaze of the 
common crowd. This is desecration, this is indeed 
profanation of that which should be inviolate. 2 

Though Juvenal tells us that he takes all life, all 
the world, for his text, — 

" Whatever passions have the soul possess'd, 
Whatever wild desires inflamed the breast, 
Joy, Sorrow, Fear, Love, Hatred, Transport, Rage, 
Shall form the motley subject of my page," 3 — 

1 " Homo sacra res homini." 

2 M. Constant Martha, Les Moralistes, p. 292. 

8 " Quidquid agunt homines, Votum, Timor, Ira, Voluptas, 
Gaudia, Discursus, nostri est farrago libelli." 

I. 85. 



252 LATIN SATIRE 

yet we find him curiously blind to social tendencies 
, . , , , which were unfolding: themselves under 

His blind- . ° 

ness to social his eyes. If one were asked what class 
in society was the most characteristic 
product of imperial Rome, one would say, without 
hesitation, the Freedmen ; and the more especially 
because this was the class with which the emperors 
seem to have dealt according to the dictates of a 
fixed and settled policy, and with some just appre- 
ciation of the social force which they represented. 
This social force was nothing less than commerce 
and enterprise, and all the arts by which a man 
might grow rich in Rome, save only war and elo- 
quence, which were the monopoly of the nobility. 
The emperors encouraged this class as a counter- 
poise to the nobles, just as Louis XL sought to 
create a middle class between the feudal barons 
and the serfs. The influence of the freedman ex- 
panded quickly. Even under Tiberius, Pallas was 
so powerful that, as Tacitus tells us, 1 " it was 
counted a proud boast to be known even to his 
lackeys." The development of this particular in- 
gredient in the formation of a middle class was 
really a step in advance for civilization, and started 
the reform which ended in the abolition of slavery. 
But Juvenal sees in the freedman, be he never so 
rich or enterprising, nothing save what is contemp- 
tible. In the first Satire he tells us, with indig- 
nation, how the very Trojugenae are thrust aside 

1 " Libertis quoque et janitoribus ejus notescere, pro mag- 
nifico accipiebatur." — Ann. VI. 8. 



BLINDNESS TO SOCIAL TENDENCIES 253 

for the freedman, whose ears bored for the ring 
proclaim that his birthplace was on the other side 
of the Euphrates, but whose five freeholds enable 
him to live in a splendor denied to the purest rep- 
resentatives of the old Roman stock. 1 In the third 
Satire, 29-40, he thus describes them : — 

" Here, then, I bid my much-loved home farewell, 
Ah, mine no more ! There let Arturius dwell 
And Catulus ; knaves who in truth's despite 
Can white to black transform and black to white, 
Build temples, furnish funerals, auctions hold, 
Farm rivers, ports, and scour the drains for gold. 
Once they were trumpeters, and ever found 
With strolling mummers in their annual round, 
While their puff 'd cheeks, which every village knew, 
Called to high feats of arms the rustic crew : 
Now they give shows themselves, and at the will 
Of the base rabble raise the sign to kill." 

The colluvies of foreign nationalities which were 
pouring into the Imperial City with their strange 
rites and outlandish gods, and were changing the 
face of society not only morally but even artistic- 
ally, found in Juvenal a supremely brilliant but 
by no means profound critic. We read how the 
Syrian Orontes has been flowing into the Tiber, 
and how the morals of the foreigners that flock to 
Rome are as crooked as the strange dulcimers and 
sistra which they carry in their train. Who does 
not remember his sketch of the Greeks, that na- 
tion of play-actors who will rejoice with them that 
do rejoice and weep with them that weep; who, 

1 I. IOO-III. 



254 LATIN SATIRE 

like Osric with Hamlet, will exclaim, " It is very 
hot," and anon, " It is indifferent cold, my lord, 
indeed;" nay, more, who, when you say, " It is 
burning hot," can actually burst into a sweat ? 
The picture is, indeed, vigorous, and reflects the 
opinion of the time. Contempt for the Greeks 
had already found its way into the very 

His con- . ' J 

tempt for tongue oi Rome, m which Graeca fides 
' s ' meant " dishonesty " and pergraecari " to 
be an arrant knave." But one would have expected 
that Juvenal should have been able to see how the 
Greeks by their philosophy were changing the face 
of Roman society. He speaks of it with contempt 
in a passage already referred to, where he says the 
difference between the Stoic and the Cynic was 
merely one of dress ; : and he even sneers at their 
art in another place, where he glorifies the times 
when soldiers smashed up priceless miracles of 
Greek workmanship to adorn their steeds, — aeon- 
tempt for the arts of civilization which would have 
been a ridiculous anachronism in the Imperial City 
of his time. 2 "I cannot bear," he cries, "this 
Graecized Rome." 3 Again, he tells us that the 
Jews worship the skies, and will not guide a Gen- 

1 " Nee Cynicos nee Stoica dogmata legit 
A Cynicis tunica distantia." — XIII. 121. 
2 " Tunc rudis et Graecas mirari nescius artes 
Urbibus eversis praedarum in parte reperta 
JMagnorum artificum frangebat pocula miles 
Ut phaleris gauderet equus." — XI. ioo. 

3 ' : Xon possum ferre, Ouirites, 
Graecam urbem." — III. 6i. 



ATTITUDE TOWARD RELIGION 255 

tile to the fountain or tell him his road. 1 Seneca 
had testified of this despised race that and the 
the vanquished gave laws to their victors, Jews- 
— "victi victorious leges dedere," — a reflection 
on the moral influence of Rome's subjects fit to be 
placed beside Horace's oft-quoted estimate of the 
literary influence of Greece on Rome. 2 

As to religion, Juvenal laughs at it, though he 
ascribes to its neglect most of Rome's 

O ■ ^TTT H5S attitllde 

disasters. In Satire XIII. 38-48 he joward 
jestingly refers to the age of Belief : — 

" There was, indeed, a time 
When the rude natives of this happy clime 
Cherish'd such dreams. 'T was ere the King of Heaven 
To change his sceptre for a scythe was driven ; 
Ere Juno yet the sweets of love had tried, 
Or Jove advanced beyond the caves of Ide. 
'T was when no gods indulged in sumptuous feasts, 
No Ganymede, no Hebe served the guests, 

1 " Nil praeter nubes et caeli numen adorant . . . 
Non monstrare vias eadem nisi sacra colenti, 
Quaesitum ad fontem solos deducere verpos." 

XIV. 97. 
2 Dean Merivale {History of the Romans under the Em- 
pire, vol. viii. ch. lxiv.) commends Juvenal and Tacitus 
for their protest against the encroachments of foreign ideas 
and sentiments, and for their hostility to everything which 
might seem to threaten the old principles and traditions of 
Rome : "No Roman writers are more thoroughly conserva- 
tive than these last of the Romans. Tacitus and Juvenal 
are more wholly Roman than even Cicero or Virgil. They 
maintain the laws, the manners, the religion of their fathers 
with more decision than ever, as they feel more than ever 
how much protection is required for them." 



256 LATIN SATIRE 

No Vulcan from his sooty labors foul 
Limp'd round officious with his nectar bowl, 
But each in private dined : 't was when the throng 
Of godlings, now beyond the scope of song, 
The courts of Heaven in spacious ease possess'd, 
And with a lighter load poor Atlas press'd." 

In his sentiments with regard to slaves, Juvenal 
toward is almost Christian. In the fourteenth 

slaves ; Satire he proclaims the doctrine that the 

slave is a man and a brother, and asks where are 
those who will 

" Instill the generous thought that slaves have powers, 
Sense, feeling, all as exquisite as ours." 1 

And one cannot forget the indignant tone of the 
passage in the sixth Satire, where the Roman lady, 
who has hired by the year a man whose sole duty 
is to scourge the slaves, chats with her female 
friends, applies her face-wash, reads her accounts, 
and discusses the gold border on her dress, while 
the eternal thong is being laid on, until the exe- 
cutioner, wearied with his scourging, flags in his 
work, and at last reluctantly she thunders his dis- 
missal, " Begone ! ' 






1 " Animos servorum et corpora nostra 
Materia constare putat paribusque elementis." 

XIV, 16. 

2 " Sunt quae tortoribus annua praestent. 
Verberat, atque obiter faciem linit, audit arnicas, 
Aut latum pictae vestis considerat aurum, 

Et caedit : longi relegit transversa diurni, 
Et caedit : donee lassis craedentibus exi 
Intonent horrendum." — VI. 480. 



ATTITUDE TOWARD CHRISTIANITY 2 57 

Juvenal's sympathy with the poor is but a com- 
monplace of his time. And what rem- toward 
edy does he suggest for their hard case ? the P oor ; 
In the third Satire (169) he urges emigration. 
Seneca would have made a better suggestion and 
said death. Indeed, we have very little comforta- 
ble or even positive advice in Juvenal. Instead of 
the thousand little precious maxims which Horace 
has given us for the regulation of our lives and the 
cleansing of our hearts, what have we from Juve- 
nal ? The cold platitude in the end of the tenth 
Satire, that the path to peace is Virtue. But Vir- 
tue could do little for men in Juvenal's time, save 
help them to die, and " make a libation of their 
blood to liberty," like Thrasea. 1 

The only class which had a sincere and serious 
answer ready to the question "What andchris- 
must I do to be saved ? " was hardly tianity - 
recognized as existing. Seneca does not dare to 
praise them, though he thinks well of them. Taci- 
tus calls them enemies of the human race. Sue- 
tonius counts their persecution among the few re- 
deeming traits of Nero's wicked reign. Quintilian 
never mentions them. Pliny accords to them a 
cold defense, and commends Trajan for recogniz- 

1 " Porrectis utriusque bracchii venis postquam cruorem 
effudit, humum super spargens, propius vocato quaestore, 
'libamus ' inquit ' Joviliberatori. Specta, juvenis : et omen 
quidem Di prohibeant, ceterum in ea tempora natus es qui- 
bus nrmare animum expediat constantibus exemplis.' " 

Tacitus, Annals, XVI. 35. 



258 LATIN SATIRE 

ing in them varying degrees of criminality, for dis- 
tinguishing hardened cases from those on whom 
their religion sat more lightly, — robitstiores from 
teneri. It is strange how little justice Christian- 
ity received from minds so cultivated and so amply 
furnished as those of Tacitus and Juvenal, Seneca 
and Pliny. After all, historical fairness, like self- 
knowledge, is perhaps better achieved by the will 
than by the understanding. 

The fortunate side of Juvenal's rhetorical train- 
The spirit ing is (as M. Constant Martha observes) 

of his age. tQ be f Qund j n the f act tliat it made his 

style an excellent representative of the spirit of his 
age. Had it been formed in the schools of philos- 
ophy, like Seneca's, it would probably have been 
in advance of his time. But in the schools of 
rhetoric we meet only ideas which are firmly held 
and widelv diffused. Thus we are able to see re- 
fleeted in the pages of Juvenal a jealous and exclu- 
sive patriciate crushed by the emperors, and giving 
place to a middle class resting mainly on the energy 
of freedmen and the development of commercial 
enterprise. Rome becomes the home of every 
foreign people and cult. Among these the most 
finely touched are the Greeks, who succeed in im- 
posing on Rome not only their manners but even 
their language, — a literary phenomenon to which 
the works of Apuleius and Fronto bear witness. 
Foreign religions germinate chiefly in the slums of 
the Imperial City, but they gradually work into the 
very heart of the whole system of government and 



THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE 259 

life. The prejudice against the slave begins to 
lose some of its force, and he begins to find sym- 
pathy at least, if no more solid blessing. The 
body politic is in outward semblance the same, 
but it contains within it seeds which are slowly 
fructifying, and which in the fullness of time will 
bring on the throes of a new birth. 



VIII. 

LATIN POETRY OF THE DECLINE. 

If we look at the Augustan Age from the spir- 
itual point of view, Ovid may be re- 

Phaedrus. f ' J . . 

garded as the poet of the Transition. 
The Silver Age is the age of words. Ovid is to 
Virgil as Euripides to Sophocles, and we find that 
Ovid is imitated more than Virgil by the poets of 
the Decline, — by Lucan, Statius, Seneca, and 
Valerius Flaccus. But if we view the question 
merely materially as one of chronology, Phaedrus 
will be the connecting link. He lived from Au- 
gustus to Nero, and is the only writer who fills the 
interval. There was between the Golden and the 
Silver Age half a century of literary darkness, 
illumined only by the trifling contributions to liter- 
ature which Phaedrus has made. He is not men- 
tioned by a single writer of the Empire but Martial 
under Domitian and Avianus under Theodosius. 
Phaedrus no doubt chose the role of a fabulist be- 
cause it was a vein hitherto neglected by the Latin 
poets. We know hardly anything about his life, 
but we are told that he incurred the resentment of 
Sejanus and was imprisoned. There is certainly 
much in his work which seems to be directed 
against Tiberius and Sejanus, and we must admire 
the bold outspokenness of many of his fables as 



PHAEDRUS 26l 



well as the ingenuity of one ambiguous criticism 
on his times : — 

" Utilius homini nihil est quam recte loqui," — 

a phrase which may mean quite equally well either 
" Nothing is more truly a man's interest than to 
speak honestly," or "It is more a man's interest 
to say nothing at all than to speak the straightfor- 
ward truth." Whether we believe or not that his 
sarcasms were resented, we may safely discredit the 
statement that, if resented, they were visited only 
with incarceration, — an incredibly light sentence 
on blasphemy against the emperor in an age when 
death was often the punishment of mere silence. 
Phaedrus is rather a raconteur than a fabulist. He 
is best when he is only telling a story. His ani- 
mals are but vehicles of moral reflections. One of 
his fables tells how there were two mules, one of 
which bore a great treasure and the other only a 
load of barley. The former is despoiled of his load 
and wounded by robbers ; the latter is unhurt, and 
bears his burden safely to its destination. But we 
read that the first stepped along proudly with his 
head in the air, while the other trudged on his way 
dejected and humble. Now these (as has been re- 
marked) are the traits, not of the beasts in the 
story, but of the human beings there symbolized, 
and the human qualities and conditions illustrated, 
luxury and poverty. Aesop never makes compared 
such a mistake. His fable and his moral with Aeso P- 
leap together from his brain. In Phaedrus the 



262 LATIN POETRY OF THE DECLINE 

moral comes first, and then he attaches an animal 
to it. Phaedrus is signalized by an overweening 
vanity and self-esteem. He constantly plumes him- 
self on his originality, or at least on his superiority 
to his model, Aesop. Like Cicero, another Tran- 
sition Poet, he is jealous of his fame and covetous 
of praise. He is very concise, but never to the 
point of obscurity like Persius. He strongly re- 
sembles the Augustan writers in his cultured taste, 
his familiarity with Greek literature, and his ambi- 
tion for a place in the regard of posterity. 

Poetry revives under Nero, and its chief repre- 
sentatives in that reign are Lucan and 

Lucan. 

Seneca. Like Catullus and Persius, Lu- 
can died very young, in his twenty-sixth year ; but, 
unlike them, he found not only an untimely but a 
dishonorable grave. He is a black spot on the 
goodly fellowship of Stoics which Persius adorned. 
He halted between the life of a courtier and the 
death of a Stoic, and faced the latter only when he 
could no longer preserve the former. He tried un- 
successfully to make the best of both worlds, and 
finally gave up his life only after the failure of a 
vile attempt to save it by the sacrifice of his mo- 
ther's. And yet he was a member of that eminent 
Stoic family which shed such lustre on the dark 
days of Nero's reign. His father was M. An- 
naeus, a son of Seneca the elder, and his uncle was 
His pre- Seneca the younger, who was high in 
cocity. favor at the court of Nero. Lucan him- 

self displayed extraordinary precocity. So the in- 



LUC AN 263 



fant prodigy was sent from Corcluba to Rome, and 
put into the mill of Palaemon and Flavius, who had 
just finished their task of ruining the style of Per- 
sius, and were now ready to take in hand a fresh 
victim. The story that bees settled on his lips in 
infancy is one which is told of many poets, but of 
none surely more inappropriately than of Lucan. 
The bee takes its fragrant store from Nature her- 
self, and never did a poet owe so little to Nature 
as Lucan, or possess more wearisomely perfect 
skill in embroidering ideas which he has not com- 
pletely grasped, pleading with feverish earnestness 
causes in which he has no interest, and making 
the most emphatic pronouncements on subjects on 
which he has no knowledge and not even preju- 
dices. 

As Ausonius, the poet of Bordeaux, owed to the 
favorable horoscope which fired the am- His early 
bition of his parents that start in life trainin s- 
which he used so well that, beginning as a teacher 
of rhetoric, he finally became consul, verifying the 
verse of Juvenal, — 

" Si fortuna volet fies de rhetore consul," — 

so Lucan owed to the chance, that he possessed a 
relative influential at court, his early introduction 
to Roman life and fashion. But the young Span- 
iard would have profited far more by the curb than 
the spur. The precocious bud of his genius needed 
pruning, to prevent its blowing into a flower too 
soon. His teachers and admirers would not even 



264 LATIN POETRY OF THE DECLINE 

leave the bud to Nature, but tried to pull open 
the leaves and make it look like a flower before its 
time. Thrust while still a child into a position 
which Lucretius, Virgil, and Horace with difficulty 
achieved for themselves, and with all his worst ten- 
dencies not corrected but fostered, did not the 
young genius afford a perfect illustration of that 
saddest and truest of sayings, Corrnptio optimi pes- 
simal At first he enjoyed high favor with the 
emperor, who made him a quaestor. It is true that 
by statute he was not yet eligible for the office. 
But what matter ? In those days it often happened 
that the first time one heard of a law was when it 
was set aside by the emperor. But ieal- 

The em- \ . . , * J 

peror's ousy soon troubled the smooth current 

jeaousy. ^ Lucan's prosperity. The emperor 
and he were equally prolific poets, but the emper- 
or's " Mimallonean boomings " 1 commanded only 
enforced applause, while those of his young rival 
were received with real enthusiasm. It is singular 
that, though Nero was so proud of his poetry, he 
so utterly failed to bring about its survival. Few 
even of the titles of his poems have come down to 
us. It seems as if a great reputation, either for 
good or for evil, in the sphere of action is unfa- 
vorable to survival in the realms of art. 
The hand of Time has smeared out the 
imperial boomings in the blood of his innocent vic- 
tims. Lucan was forbidden to read his verses in 
public. One might as well have taken away books 
1 " Mimalloneis bombis."' — Pers. I. 99. 



LUC AN AND NERO 265 

from Cicero, rich meats from Vitellius, or men 
from Cleopatra. The applause of the salon was the 
air which Lucan breathed. Full of bitterness, he 
threw himself into the conspiracy of Piso, resent- 
ing not so much the suppression of the liberties of 
his country as of his own right to thrill the ears of 
the applauding public. By no writer has the Re- 
public been more ardently beloved than by Lucan, 
but he loved it, not as a form of government, but 
as a subject for rhetoric ; not as the creation of the 
Roman people, but as the theme of the " Pharsalia." 
If Martial is to be believed when he tells of the 
profits earned by that poem, 1 we may say that few 
have sold their country more advantageously than 
Lucan. He was a political economist, too : Ro- 
man citizenship was at a discount ; he bought it 
in the cheapest market, the Comitia, and sold it in 
the dearest, the Argiletum, or Booksellers' Street, 
of Rome. What did a Spaniard care about Rome ? 
He would never have come near it, but that it was 
the best opening for a young man of talent, and 
the best market for the gaudy wares which he had 
to sell. 

We know how Piso's conspiracy was discovered, 
and how, among all the nobles and poets Lucan's 
that took part in it, there was not one death ° 
who was not as ready as an Irish Invincible to pur- 
chase his own safety by denouncing the rest, save 

1 Martial, XIV. 194, makes Lucan say of himself: — 

" Sunt quidam qui me dicunt non esse poetam : 
Sed qui me vendit bibliopola putat." 



266 LATIN POETRY OF THE DECLINE 

one poor harlot, Epicharis, whom, perhaps, some 
womanish weakness, maybe indignation at the ju- 
dicial murder of a lover, had driven into the plot, 
but from whom, in the words of Tacitus, " neither 
scourge nor fire, nor the fury of the torturers, who 
were loth to be beaten by a woman," could extort 
one word of confession, betrayal, or retractation. 
Lucan surpassed the rest in his eagerness to save 
his life even by denouncing his own mother, an act 
which gives a new and literal meaning to Juvenal's 
scathing line, — 

" Et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas." 

But the imperial matricide was not impressed by 
the sacrifice of a mother, and Lucan was forced 
to confront what he calls " the greatest of hor- 
rors," the face of Death. He bled to death at the 
age of six-and-twenty, reciting some verses from 
the " Pharsalia." He can hardly have been in love 
with death, which he tried so basely to shun ; yet 
he is never tired of glorifying it. Of facing death 
he writes : — 

" Happiest who can, next happiest he who must." 1 

And again : — 

" God cheats men into living on by hiding 
How blest it is to die." 2 

1 " Scire mori sors prima viris, sed proxima cogi." 

Phars. IX. 211. 
2 " Victurosque dei celant, ut vivere durent, 
Felix esse mori." — Phars. IV. 520. 



LUCAN\S RELIGIOUS FEELINGS 267 

God certainly seems to have succeeded in conceal- 
ing the charms of death from this pseudo-Stoic, 
who was as unworthy of his family as of his age, 
and who was not ashamed to try to claim credit 
for a great death after exhausting all the devices 
of turpitude to avoid it. 

Quintilian said of the " Pharsalia " that it was 
perhaps rhetoric rather than poetry, — Quintiiian's 
an excellent criticism, which might well ^the™ 
be applied to certain modern poets. Ad- " pharsali a-" 
mirable as are the " Lays of Ancient Rome " and 
" Lalla Rookh," we feel that the main ingredient 
in the handiwork of Macaulay and Moore is not 
poetry, but rhetoric, when we compare them with 
" Christabel " or " Maud ; " and the same will be 
the result of a comparison between the " Pharsa- 
lia " and the " Aeneid." 

Lucan, as has been observed by Mr. Crutwell, 
has not the reverence of Virgil for the 

t Lucan's re- 

gods, nor the antagonism of Lucretius ; Hgfous 
he does not rise above a flippant and 
shallow scepticism. Hence he is hampered in the 
use of the supernatural, and is obliged to have 
recourse to witches, demons, ghosts, and visions. 
The real strength of this epic poem without a hero 
is in the rhetorical skill displayed in those parts of 
it where rhetoric is really appropriate, as for in- 
stance in the magnificent reflections on His 
the death of Pompey. It is his match- rhetoric 
less powers as a rhetorician and a phrasemonger 1 
1 Quintilian calls him sententiis clarissimus. 



268 LATIN POETRY OF THE DECLINE 

that have made a poem, perused throughout by 
few, such a fruitful source of quotations which 
have become household words : like " In se magna 
ruunt," " Stat magni nominis umbra," "Victrix 
causa deis placuit sed victa Catoni," "Nulla fides 
regni sociis," " Multis utile bellum," "Nil actum 
reputans si quid superesset agendum." But it is 
Exaggera- this gift which has often betrayed him 
into wild exaggeration, as in the episode, 
over three hundred lines long, of the African ser- 
pents and the deaths which they inflicted, 1 and in 
the loathsome banquet of the carrion birds and 
beasts on the field of Pharsalia, which reminds one 
of a horrible passage in Byron's " Siege of Cor- 
inth," beginning, — 

" And he saw the lean dogs 'neath the wall 
Hold o'er the dead their carnival." 

Lucan is a perfect type of Silver Poetry, because 
Lucan a per- his strong point is his power of descrip- 
Siiver pe ° f tl0n - ^or ^ * s * n tne i r descriptions that 
Poetry. ^h.Q Gold and Silver Ages present to us 

a most marked contrast. The Golden Age is sub- 
jective, and detail is subservient to a spiritual de- 

1 One cannot but smile at the absurd exaggeration of such 
expressions as umim pro corpore volnus. Still more ridic- 
ulous is his description of the difficulties attending the 
burial of the victims of the serpents, who swelled so much 
that their graves would rise into mountains. But perhaps 
his wildest hyperbole is when he cautions the emperor to 
keep the centre of the heavens when added to the stars, lest 
his weight should overbalance the firmament. 



A TYPE OF SILVER POETRY 269 

lineation ; description is rather a sketch than a 
picture, and addresses itself more to the mind than 
to the eye. The Silver Age revels in objective 
detail, and dwells more on repulsive than attrac- 
tive qualities, for the former are more obvious to 
a less keen insight. Beauty, except to the eye of 
genius, is uniform, while ugliness presents, even to 
a commonplace observation, a multitude of differ- 
ent features, and a wide field for detailed elabora- 
tion. M. Nisard has well illustrated this contrast 
by comparing Virgil's Sibyl in the sixth book of 
the " Aeneid " and Lucan's in the fifth of the 
"Pharsalia." Virgil paints, Lucan anatomizes. 
The same will be the result of putting side by side 
a picture of a shipwreck by each poet. A faculty 
for minutely describing natural objects, to which 
may be added erudition (if that is a good quality 
in a poet), constitutes the chief merit of Lucan, 
and perhaps the only merit of the "Thebaid" 
and "Achilleid" of Statius, the " Argonautica " of 
Valerius Flaccus, the " Punica" of Silius Italicus, 
and the " Aetna " whose author is unknown. 

The other poet of the reign of Nero, if poet he 
can be called, is Seneca the younger. „ 

11 Seneca. 

No fewer than six Senecas have been 
postulated at different times in the history of liter- 
ature, but we have no evidence whatever that there 
were more than two, — the father, who wrote works 
on rhetoric ; and the son, who not only cultivated 
his father's favorite studies, but was the author of 
several tragedies, which, there is reason to believe, 



270 LATIN POETRY OF THE DECLINE 

were never put upon the stage. Martial congratu- 
lates Corduba on having produced two Senecas, 
meaning doubtless the rhetorician and the tragic 
poet. Sidonius Apollinaris speaks of one Seneca 
who cultivates " scabrous " Plato, while the other 
" makes the stage of Euripides shake beneath his 
tread." 1 Opinions differ widely not only concern- 
ing the merits of the tragedies as a whole, but also 
concerning the relative excellence of each as com- 
pared with the others. One critic calls the " Oedi- 
pus" " a great work," "a precious jewel," while the 
"Troades" he pronounces utterly worthless; and 
of the " Octavia " he says, " If it is not the work 
of a child, I am a child myself." Another calls 
the "Troades" divine, the "Octavia" below it, 
but still excellent; while the "Oedipus" in his 
judgment is so lacking in all inspiration that it 
can hardly be reckoned among tragedies at all. 
Teuffel writes, " The praetexta entitled ' Octavia ' 
is certainly not by Seneca." On the question of 
the merits of the tragedies as works of art there 
can hardly be two opinions. They were 

Effect of J . r , i • 

stoicism on evidently written for the arm-chair, not 

lspa}S ' the stage, but even as such they are 

worthless as studies of the human mind. The 

1 " Quorum alter colit hispidum Platonem, 
Orchestram quatit alter Euripidis." 

The extreme infelicity of the epithet hispidum as applied to 
Plato almost prepares us for the metrical monstrosity in the 
next verse. 



SENECA THE YOUNGER 27 1 

philosophy of Seneca reappears in his plays. The 
oft-quoted lines, 1 — 

" Where you were your birth before, 
There you '11 be when you 're no more," — 

afford a good example of the kind of moralizing 
which prevails in his plays. Their key-note is 
Stoicism. No virtues are found in them but the 
virtues of the schools. All the softer traits of hu- 
manity disappear. Modesty, pure love, filial affec- 
tion no longer have any interest, but must make 
way for the virtues that can strut and rant. 
Love in Seneca is sensual and shameless. The 
Phaedra of Euripides 2 struggles against 
the burden that is laid upon her, but Aph- with 

. Euripides. 

rodite is greater than she. She speaks 
of her mother Pasiphae with pity, and, though 
dissuaded by her nurse, persists in her resolve to 
die. The Latin Phaedra exults in her passion for 
Hippolytus, envies the monstrous love of Pasiphae, 
and pretends a resolution to die, that she may 
deceive her nurse and gain her as an accomplice. 
And while laboriously unfolding the unnatural 
aberrations of a distorted passion, Seneca ima- 
gines that he is doing what Euripides did and 
analyzing a woman's heart. In the same way he 
transforms the loving yet patient Deianira of 
Sophocles into a furious virago, and Antigone into 

1 " Quaeris quo jaceas post obitum loco, 

Quo non nata jacent." 

2 Hippol 337 ff. 



2-J2 LATIN POETRY OF THE DECLINE 

a special pleader, who discusses with her father 
Oedipus the question how far his relations with 
his mother can be held to involve real guiltiness. 
The death of Polyxena in Euripides, put beside 
that of Iphigenia in Aeschylus and his imitator 
Lucretius, shows a great lowering of tone. But in 
Euripides we have only to complain that Polyxena 
is too collected when she thinks how she must 
arrange her robes so as to fall with decency and 
decorum ; in Seneca, Polyxena rivals Cato in her 
stoical contempt of death, and dashes herself to 
the ground, invoking mother Earth's vengeance on 
her sacrificers. There is the same exaggeration in 
his male characters. His Hercules dies in the at- 
titude of a gladiator ; and his Oedipus has only to 
be set beside that of Sophocles, and it will at once 
be seen how completely all refinement has left the 
portrait. 

Though Petronius Arbiter has transmitted to us 
Petronius a good deal more prose than verse, I 
Arbiter. ma y p ern aps include in this review of 
the poetry of the Decline one who has left us a 
poem on the Civil War in three hundred verses, 
which good authorities have pronounced to out- 
weigh in the critical balance the whole of the 
" Pharsalia," 1 and a fragment of five -and -sixty 

1 Mr. Heitland, in his very able introduction to Mr. 
Haskins' excellent edition of the Pharsalia, regards this 
little poem as thrown off half in rivalry, half in imitation of 
Lucan, like our Rejected Addresses, though less definitely 
intended for ridicule. 



PETRONIUS ARBITER 273 

lines on the " Capture of Troy," containing the 
Laocoon episode, and balked (it has been said) 
of its place among the masterpieces only by 
the inevitable comparison with the incomparable 
" Aeneid." I own that I have not formed so high 
an opinion of these poems, or of the other metrical 
jenx d? esprit scattered through the " Satyricon," 
but I gladly embrace the opportunity of making a 
few observations on one of the most singular lega- 
cies to us from the ancient world. Whether this 
strange medley (resembling in some respects the 
Satura Menipped) was written as a satire on Nero 
or Tigellinus, or on the other hand was merely a 
study in the social life of the writer's time, and who 
that writer was, and where he lived, — these are 
questions which have been often asked and have 
received various answers. The belief long pre- 
vailed that the author of the " Satyricon " was the 
consul Petronius, of whose life and character Taci- 
tus has given us such a brilliant sketch in the 
" Annals," 1 and who, according to that historian, 
while his life-blood, in obedience to the tyrant's 
mandate, was flowing from his veins, wrote a full 
account of the profligacy of Nero and his court, 
and sent it under his seal to the emperor. And it 
was maintained that we have in the " Satyricon," 
a part of which is extant, this very document. 
But it is absolutely extravagant to suppose that 
even the fragment of the " Satyricon " which we 
possess (and there is good reason to believe that it 
1 XVI. 18, 19. 



274 LATIN POETRY OF THE DECLINE 

is not a tenth part of the whole work) could have 
been composed and dictated in a single day by 
a man bleeding to death. Besides, the " Satyri- 
con " is not such a work as the death-bed cJiro- 
nique scandaleuse of the consular victim of Nero's 
tyranny must have been. What character in the 
fragment could possibly stand for the tyrant, and 
why should the writer have been careful to veil his 
invective behind so impenetrable a screen, when, 
destined not to survive his work, he might have 
made all the debauchery and cruelty of the imperial 
monster burn naked in letters of fire before the 
eyes of his countrymen ? But I have already said 
too much on a subject on which I should not 
have touched, were it not that histories and dic- 
tionaries of literature still treat this extravagant 
hypothesis as tenable. Mr. Crutwell's excellent 
" History of Roman Literature " rightly repudi- 
ates it. Petronius has been placed in the time 
of Augustus, Tiberius, Nero, Marcus Aurelius, 
Severus, Zenobia, Constantine, Julian, and has 
even been identified with a bishop of Bologna 
who died and was canonized in the fifteenth cen- 
tury. If he was the author of the " Satyricon," 
we cannot help feeling a want of confidence in 
the efficacy of the intercession of St. Petronius. 

The chief interest of the " Satyricon " for us is 
His work the specimen which it affords us of every- 
pictoe^of 11 * day manners and conversation under the 
social life. Empire. We find all the usual features 
of the sermo volgaris, and what especially strikes 



A PICTURE OF SOCIAL LIFE 27$ 

us is, that familiar discourse at this period repro- 
duces the archaic language of the comic drama 
far more conspicuously than even the familiar 
correspondence of Cicero. We meet the charac- 
teristic irregularities of gender, such as vinus, 
fatus, caelus, schemae ; old forms like lacte for 
lac and fnuiisci for frui ; anomalies of verbal in- 
flexion, as mirat, vagat, pudeatur ; and late uses 
of words, as querela, " a quarrel," latrocinium, 
" larceny," largus and even ambitiosus in the 
sense of " abundant." Again, as in Cicero's let- 
ters, we meet conversational phrases presenting 
a curious similarity to the slang of to-day, — 
urceatim pluere, " to rain bucketfuls ; " olla male 
fervet, "it is hard to keep the pot boiling ;" fides 
male ambulans, "tottering credit;" habet haec res 
partem, " there 's money in this ; " prae litteras (sic) 
fattens, " mad after books." Broadly, the Latinity 
is on the verge of Low Latin, a fact which must 
be insisted on because the purity of the Petrohian 
Latinity has often been praised. Even Lipsius 
has styled Petronius epigrammatically, but surely 
erroneously, auctor purissimae impuritatis. 

As the " Satyricon " is not in the hands of many, 
and indeed ou°:ht by no means to be _ . 

J Specimen of 

recommended for general perusal, I may the " Satyri- 

. . con " from 

perhaps bring before you a specimen 01 this point 
the conversation at Trimalchio's table, 
which will show how little this feature of social 
life has undergone any real change since the days 
of the Roman Empire. I pass over the more 



276 LATIN POETRY OF THE DECLINE 

serious table-talk in which Cicero and Publilius 
Syrus are compared, ghost stories are told, and 
impromptus thrown off, as well as the pretentious 
monologues in which Trimalchio amusingly dis- 
plays his ignorance of mythology, history, and 
science. These passages are too formal for my 
purpose, which is to exhibit in a free and abridged 
translation the ordinary give-and-take of common- 
place conversation between average and undistin- 
guished guests during the temporary absence of 
the host from the room. 1 

" As his departure delivered us from his usurpation of the 
talk, we tried to draw our neighbors into conversation. 
'What is a day?' cried Dama, after calling for a larger 
glass. ' Nothing. Before you have time to turn round it is 
night. One should therefore go straight from the bedroom 
to the dining-room. And what a regular freezing we have 
been having of late ! I could scarcely get hot in my bath. 
However, a hot drink is as good as a greatcoat. I 've had 
some stiff ones \stami7iatas\ and I am about full ; it has got 
into my head.' Here Seleucus broke in with, ' I don't take 
a bath every day. Constant washing wears out the body as 
well as the clothes; but when I 've put down my good posset 
of mead, I can tell the cold go hang. However, I could not 
have bathed to-day in any case, as I had to attend a funeral. 
Poor Chrysanthus, you know, a nice fellow, has just slipped 
his wind \animam ebulliit\ It was only the other day he 

1 Sat. XLI.-XLVI. The conversation is so steeped in 
the slang of the period that I have added the Latin in some 
cases. Without the Latin I might be suspected of exagger- 
ating the colloquial character of the language. I have fol- 
lowed the text of Biicheler, under whose hands Petronius 
emerged from chaos into cosmos. The interpretation is 
nearly always that of Friedlander's admirable edition. 



SPECIMEN OF THE " SATYRICON" 277 

said how d' ye do to me. I can fancy I am talking to him 
now. Ah, we are only air-balloons, summer flies ; this life 's 
a bubble. And it 's not as if he had n't tried the fasting 
cure. For five days neither bit nor sup passed his lips, and 
yet he 's gone. Too many doctors did for him, or else it was 
to be. A doctor 's really no use except to feel you did the 
right thing. An excellent funeral it was, superior bier and 
trappings, and the mourners first class.' He was becoming a 
bore, and Phileros interrupted him with ' Oh, let us leave 
the dead alone. He's all right. He had a decent life and 
a decent death. What has he to complain of ? He rose 
from the gutter, and was once so poor that he would have 
picked a farthing out of a midden with his teeth. But he 
grew like a honeycomb. I suppose he has left behind him a 
cool 100,000, and all in hard cash. To speak the truth — 
for, as you know, I wear my heart upon my sleeve \linguam 
caninam comedi~\ — he was a rough-spoken fellow, quarrel- 
someness personified \discoi'dia 11011 homo']. Now his bro- 
ther was a fine, friendly, open-handed gentleman, and kept a 
good table. At first everything went ugly with him Sjnalam 
fiarram pilavit], but his first vine-crop pulled him together 
\recorrexit costas] ; he sold his wine for whatever he chose 
to ask. But what really kept his head above water \inentum 
sustulit] was that legacy, when he walked into a good deal 
more than was left him. That was why that blockhead 
Chrysanthus quarreled with his own brother, and left away 
his money to some Tom, Dick, or Harry \nescio cui terrae 
filio]. It 's an ill turn when a man turns his back on his own. 
He took all his slaves told him for gospel \Jiabnit oracularios 
servos], and they played the deuce with him. Credulity is 
fatal, especially for a business man. However, he got far 
more than he deserved ; Fortune's favorite, lead turned to 
gold under his hands. And how many years do you think 
he had on his back? Seventy and more, I should say. But 
he was as hard as nails [corneohis\ and carried his age 
splendidly, — as black as a crow. Ah, I knew him long, long 
ago, when he did something smack, something grow to. 



2;8 LATIX POETRY OF THE DECLEXE 

He had a general kind of taste [omnis minervae homo~\. 
Well, he enjoyed himself, and I for one don't blame him. 
It's all he takes to the grave with him.' 

" •' How you go on talking.* said Ganymedes, ' about what 
has nothing to do with the heavens above or the earth be- 
neath, and no one troubles his head about the supply of 
food. I declare I could not buy a mouthful of bread this 
day. It "s the drought, and now we have had a year's fast. 
Bad luck to the Aediles. they have an understanding with 
the bakers : i; Scratch 7iie and I'll scratch you \_serva vie, ser- 
vabo te.]" So it 's the folk in a small way [populus minutus\ 
bear the brunt, while the topsawyers have high jinks all the 
time \isti majores maxillae semper saturnalia agunf\. Ah, 
if we had the giants now that we had when I came back 
from Asia ! How well I remember Safmius ! He lived near 
the Old Arch when I was a boy : a regular pepper-box. 
he 'd knock sparks out of the ground under his feet [piper 
non homo, is quacunque ibat terrain adurebaf]. And so in 
his time food was cheap as dirt. You "d get for an as a loaf 
that two men could not eat ; now you get a thing the size of 
a bull's eye. Ah. things are going from bad to worse every 
day. This place is growing downwards like a cow's tail 
[retro versus crescit tanquam cauda vituli\. But I 'm hanged 
if I don't think it is all the irreligion of the age ; no one fasts 
or cares a jot for Jupiter. Time was when our ladies used to 
go in their robes with tossed hair, bare feet, and pure hearts, 
and pray for rain, and it used to rain bucketfuls at once, and 
they all came back like drowned rats. But now we have lost 
our religion, and the fields are feeling the effect of it.' 
' Easy, easy,' said Echion, a shoddy merchant: 'there are 
ups and downs, as the peasant said when he lost his speckled 
pig : to-morrow may bring what we have n't to-day. — that 's 
the way the world jogs along [sic vita truditur\ There would 
not be a better country than this in the world, only for the 
men that are in it. It is in a poor way now. but so are ethers. 
We must n't be too particular. The sky's above us all [ubi- 
que inedius caelus est]. If you lived somewhere else, you 



ESTIMATE OF THE " SATYRICON v 279 

would say that here the pigs were going about ready roast, 
crying Who 7/ cat me f " 

The conversation then turns on a flirtation be- 
tween a certain lady and her slave, and the mean- 
ness of Norbanus, who provided such wretched 
gladiators that they had no chance against the wild 
beasts. Before Trimalchio returns, the shoddy 
merchant, warmed with wine, has plucked up spirit 
to invite the great litterateur Agamemnon to his 
poor abode, promising to show him his son, who 
is an infant phenomenon for brains, and would be 
very industrious, only he is " clean gone on pet 
birds " (in aves morbosus). He tells Agamemnon 
his son is now in four times (quattuor partes elicit), 
by which he means that he can divide by four, for 
it was the division, not the multiplication, table 
that was taught to Roman boys, who had to learn, 
not what was four times twelve, but what was the^ 
fourth, the half, three fourths, of twelve. 

We have nowhere a more vigorous sketch of a 
purse-proud millionaire than in Trimal- General es- 
chio, who never buys anything, as there J™*?saty- 
is nothing which is not produced on ricon -" 
some one or other of his estates, many of which 
he has never seen ; who asks, " What is a poor 
man ? " and who punishes the slave for picking 
up a silver dish which had fallen on the floor, 
and gives orders that it shall be thrown out with 
the rest of the sweepings of the hall. The frag- 
ment is no doubt full of impurities, and it depicts 
a society not only utterly depraved, but strangely 



280 LATIN POETRY OF THE DECLINE 

coarse under a superficial refinement. Yet it treats 
love, or perhaps we should rather say gallantry, 
with far more feeling than any poet of the Sil- 
ver Age, and it stands alone in Latin literature 
for the dramatic skill with which the characters 
are made to speak each in the tone and style 
which befits his position and education. This is 
a completely modern note, and we are often re- 
minded of the dexterous touch of George Eliot 
when we listen to the silly prattle of the less culti- 
vated convives. Ganymedes, for instance, gives 
three separate and quite unconnected reasons, — 
the drought, the incompetence of the Aediles, and 
the irreligion of the age, — each of which alone is 
said to account for the dearness of provisions ; and 
Seleucus explains the death of Chrysanthus by the 
hypothesis that he had too many doctors, " or else 
it was to be," — just such a fatuity as would have 
been put into the mouth of Mr. Brooke by George 
Eliot, who is never richer in her dramatic coloring 
than when she is portraying intellectual poverty 
and logical inconsequence. But we must dwell no 
more on a work which, though full of instruction 
and deserving far more attention than it has re- 
ceived from English scholarship, is certainly more 
interesting for the pictures of society than for the 
poetry which it contains. 

With Statius and Martial, their rise and their 
decline, is closely connected an institution so char- 
acteristic of the Roman Empire that a few obser- 
vations concerning it will not be out of place here. 



RECITATION, ITS RISE AND FALL 28 1 

The habit of consulting the taste of one's friends 
about one's poetry was as old at least ^ . . 

A J Recitation, 

as Horace, who tells how he used to its rise and 

fall. 

show his work to his friend Varus, who 
would say to him, " Revise that, I pray, and that ; " 
and Tarpa seems in his time to have been a gen- 
eral referee on literary questions. But the pub- 
lic calling together of one's friends to pronounce 
on a newly written poem was the invention of 
Asinius Pollio, whose taste even in boyhood was 
so warmly commended by Catullus. Public read- 
ings were encouraged by Augustus. In this, as 
in other matters, we recognize in Ovid a link con- 
necting the Golden with the Silver Age. Ovid, 
like Lucan, loves publicity and display. Horace 
and Virgil crave quiet and privacy. The practice 
of reciting fell into disuse in the literary barrenness 
of the principate of Tiberius ; but under Nero, and 
again under Domitian, it revived and flourished. 
We read in a letter of Pliny's that " for the whole 
of April there was hardly a day without a public 
reading." One Crispinus was the great manager 
and arranger of these reunions, which reach their 
high-water mark in the time of Martial, and of 
Statius, of whom Juvenal tells us that when he 
named a day for a public reading he threw all 
Rome into a state of delight. A sign of lessened 
interest in public recitations appears in the change 
of name given to them when they began to be 
called ostentationes (e7uSei£ets) instead of recitationes; 
and Pliny 1 mentions an amusing contretemps which 
1 Ep. VI. 15. 



282 LATIN POETRY OF THE DECLINE 

perhaps marks the epoch when their popularity was 
beginning; to wane. One Passienus Paulus began 
to recite a poem in which he had assumed per- 
mission to address his friend Javolenus Priscus. 
The recitation commenced with the words, " Thou 
bidd'st me, Priscus," 2 but unfortunately his friend 
Priscus was present, and, being a plain person who 
held by matter of fact in all things, he interrupted 
the reciter with, " Excuse me, I did nothing of the 
kind ; there must be some mistake." The exam- 
ple of Priscus was thereafter followed by persons 
who were bored by the recitations, and interrupted 
them with the suggestions of a pretended simplicity. 
On another occasion chance was on the side of the 
audience. During a public reading in the house 
of Capito, a chair occupied by a very corpulent 
member of the audience began to emit ominous 
groans and creakings which portended imminent 
ruin. When finally it collapsed under its load, 
and when the occupant, who had been fast asleep, 
woke up declaring that he had just closed his eyes 
to concentrate his attention on the poem, but had 
never been asleep at all, the peals of laughter were 
so loud and long that Capito was obliged to an- 
nounce that the rest of the reading would be post- 
poned to another day. The whole tale as told by 
Pliny reminds us how some little foibles of human- 
ity have survived unchanged from the days of 
Domitian, and that then as now the charge of hav- 
ing fallen asleep was likely to be repudiated with 
1 Prisce,jubes. 



STATIUS 283 



an indignation often not felt under far more serious 
imputations. We read, moreover, that it was the 
habit of rich men to send their servants to rep- 
resent them at such functions, just as they now 
sometimes commission empty carriages to do vi- 
carious mourning at funerals. These servants, no 
doubt, especially if they were Greeks, were skillful 
in devising means of interrupting the performance, 
or miching from it to the nearest tavern. Plain- 
tive is the lamentation of Pliny over the decline 
of the institution, and frequent are his assurances 
that he never failed to respond to an invitation to 
such a stance, and that "all who loved letters" — 
by which he means all who encouraged recitations 
— were ever sure of his sympathy and applause. 

For such a purpose no one could have higher 
qualifications than Statius, who was, of 

1 t-> 1 Statius. 

all the Roman poets, the most ready and 
versatile. Like Ovid and Pope, " he lisped in num- 
bers, for the numbers came." He writes private lit- 
tle notes to his wife and daughter in verse, — that 
wife Claudia who so fondly adored her husband 
ever since the day when she saw him crowned with 
the wreath of victory at the Alban games, and who 
would not allow him to leave the scene of wider fame 
and louder plaudits for Naples, where he would fain 
be again, and where he thinks 1 he would get a hus- 
band for his beautiful and clever daughter (Clau- 
dia's step-daughter) whom he loves so much, and 
who is withering on the virgin thorn in a city of 
1 Silv. III. 5. 



284 LATIN POETRY OF THE DECLINE 

venal tenderness, and of marriage without love, 
but never without dowry. Words seem to have 
come to Statius before thoughts. It is a question, 
says M. Nisard in his brilliant account of the 
Statii pere et fils, whether there are innate ideas, 
but he seems to have had innate verses. His fa- 
ther had won crowns in the Nemean, Isthmian, and 
Pythian festivals at Naples, and probably half a 
dozen faded wreaths were all that he left to his 
son, except a valuable goodwill in the poetic busi- 
ness. His father had lived through the troublous 
times when Vitellianists and Vespasianists were at 
each other's throats. One day the Capitol was 
burned. This was fortunate for him, because it 
gave him a subject for a poem, which he had writ- 
ten and dedicated to the emperor before the ashes 
were cold. He was moreover in the habit of giv- 
ing lessons in Greek, and teaching their ritual to 
the Julian and Sibylline priests, the Augurs, and 
the Luperci. Thus he was able to introduce his 
son to influential patrons, and Statius the younger 
Poet to the at on ce became poet-laureate to the aris- 
aristocracy. tocracy. The loss of a wife, a dog, a 
parrot, found in him a ready chronicler ; orders 
were executed with punctuality and dispatch ; and 
the building of a palace was not a theme too high 
for him, or the purchase of a turbot too low. 
Statius was of course a flatterer, not only of the 
emperor but of his favorites, freedmen and sons 
of freedmen, for whom he invented pedigrees. 
He had the alternative of kissing the emperor's 



MARTIAL 285 



feet, like Martial, or of sharing the fate of Lucan 
and Seneca. The emperors would have been glad 
if all the people had but one throat out of which 
the life might be squeezed ; but, failing that, they 
found it their interest to flatter the people, while 
they forced proud nobles into the arena, and min- 
gled the blood of a Paulus Aemilius with that of a 
German slave. The court poet is betrayed in the 
lukewarmness of Statius' eulogy 1 on his brother- 
poet Lucan. The frigid mythology which we find 
in this piece runs through all his poetry, which 
from childhood to age never took one step in 
advance. The commonplaces of rhetoric are the 
Alpha and Omega of his art. 

It is customary to represent Martial as the most 
debased of flatterers, who licked the feet 

r . ,. . t-. . . , , . Martial. 

or the living Domitian and spat on his 
corse. This view is not altogether wrong. Gen- 
eral opinion is seldom wholly mistaken, but often 
needs qualification, and here it needs much. He 
undoubtedly exaggerates habitually anything good 
that may be found in the living Domitian, and 
studiously conceals his faults ; but that he in- 
sulted the dead emperor is not true. What are 
his allusions to Domitian after his death ? He 
writes to Nerva : — 

" In troublous times the heavy hand of might 
Could not divert thee from the path of right.'' 2 

1 Silv. II. 7. 

2 " Sub principe duro 
Temporibusque malis ausus es esse bonus." 



286 LATIN POETRY OF THE DECLINE 

This and a few other equally moderate utterances 
are the grounds on which the indictment rests. 1 
Surely we have not here one who tramples on a 
often mis- fallen oppressor, but rather one who 
represented. f ee j s that by former expressions he has 
forfeited the right to be as severe as the case war- 
rants. Pliny 2 ascribes sincerity to Martial, and 
we must remember that the epigram, the form 
which he chose as the vehicle for his thoughts, 
almost excludes the softer feelings. His con- 
demnation of Nero 3 is certainly neither vehement 
nor abundant. A military despotism is the worst 
sort of tyranny, because it kills the sentiments 
which are the very life of a civilized society. " It 
created around itself the quiet of the graveyard," 
says Teuffel : " servility alone was allowed to 
speak." We cannot help feeling for the poet 
Poorly re- when we find how little material benefit 
hteflatter' ^e rea P ec ^ fr° m the prostitution of a great 
ies. genius to the poor business of a court 

poet. It is pathetic to see him licking the hand 
which pushes him away, and blessing the emperor 

1 XII. 15. 9 is equally temperate, but V. 19. 5 and XII. 6. 
4 are stronger. The fierce couplet — 

" Flavia gens, quantum tibi tertius abstulit haeres : 
Paene fuit tanti non habuisse duos 1 ' — 

is included in the " Spectaculorum liber" (32). It is due to a 
Schol. on Juv. IV. 38. and it is not certain that it is by Martial. 

2 Ep. III. 21. 

3 It is decided enough, but not very earnest, as in A' 1 1. 34. 4: 

(i Quid Xerone pejus ? 
Quid thermis melius Xeronianis ? " 



MARTIAL'S EMPTY HONORS 287 

for the kind tone in which he refuses his peti- 
tion : — 

" If this be the smile with which help is refused, what must 
be the smile when he gives ? " l 

He got little but empty honors, which made his 
poverty the more galling, because they imposed 
upon him some little dignity to maintain. To set 
against thousands of petitions we have not a single 
acknowledgment of a pecuniary favor. He seems 
to have received from the emperor a wretched lit- 
tle house in the country, the roof of which was not 
water-tight, and the garden of which did not supply 
him with sufficient vegetables for his frugal table. 2 
He exults over the present of a new toga from 
Parthenianus, 3 but feels that he can hardly live up 
to such a garment, and begs for a common one to 
save it. 4 Always the beggar's whine; and his de- 
light when he receives an alms shows how rare was 
such a piece of luck. Always indigence, which 
often betrays itself in the cynicism of his epigrams, 
as in that one 5 where he cries : — 

" My parents in their folly taught me letters," 6 — 

an unfilial exclamation wrung from him by the 
success of a contemporary shoemaker. 

1 J Meagre de- 

Martial, like the other Roman poets, tails of his 

life 

tells us hardly anything of his youth. 

1 "Si negat hoc voltu, quo solet ergo dare? " 

2 VII. 31. 36. 3 VIII. 28. 
4 IX. 50. 5 IX. 74. 

6 " At me litterulas stulti docuere parentes." 



288 LATIN POETRY OF THE DECLINE 

We know, however, that he came from Bilbilis to 
Rome at the age of one-and-twenty, in the reign 
of Nero, and lived there till he was six-and-fifty. 
He wrote nothing under Nero, nor under Galba, 
Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, those emperors whose 
reigns were counted by weeks, and four of whom 
sat in the Palace of the Caesars during ten months, 
"as if," in the words of Plutarch, "they were play- 
ers in a booth, going on to the stage and anon off 
again." When he left Rome after a sojourn of 
thirty years, so little had he made by being a court 
poet that his friend Pliny had to discharge the cost 
of his return to his native Bilbilis. The twelfth 
book, which was written there, is full of melancholy 
and regret for Rome. We do not know whether 
his life reached the limit of five-and- seventy years 
which he coveted, but he seems to have outlived 
his enjoyments, ambitions, and hopes. 

He has left us fourteen books, containing nearly 
Estimate of fifteen hundred epigrams. We could well 
his poetry, dispense with about two thirds of them, 
but the residue is precious. We have in Martial 
a matchless picture of Rome. Nowhere else do 
we find one so strong, so spirited, so filthy, even so 
mean, for now nothing is on a great scale in Rome 
except vice. Though the vehicle of his thoughts is 
so adverse to the expression of sensibility, yet we 
have distinct signs of it in his poetry, as when he 
declares that the birthday of his beloved Quintus 
conferred on him a greater boon than his own ; that 
a gift to a friend is the only thing that is out of the 



STATIUS AND MARTIAL COMPARED 289 

reach of chance, and money given away in presents 
is the only abiding wealth. His sincere and exquis- 
ite pictures of the delights of country life could not 
have been drawn by a man of shallow heart ; and 
we cannot help feeling that he was on the whole a 
good man, who, in the forty-seventh epigram in the 
fifth book, enumerates the ingredients of a happy 
life. His impurities would now forbid the applica- 
tion to him of any such title, but we must remem- 
ber that expressions which shock us now did not 
seem shocking to his contemporaries. He even 
boasts that young girls can read him without 
danger ; and indeed his books are a pathological 
museum of vice, and his foul epigrams, like Zola's 
novels, disgust rather than corrupt. Respectable 
men in Rome avowed their admiration of him, and 
he challenges his readers to find anything foul in 
his life, unchaste though his verses may be and 
are. 

Statius and Martial never mention each other's 
names, no doubt because they were rival „ . 

Statius and 

beggars compelled to offer their literary Martial com- 
wares to an emperor who was no judge pare ' 
of them, and who had to be approached through 
illiterate eunuchs and freedmen. M. Nisard com- 
pares certain poems in which Statius and Martial 
have treated the same theme, and is disposed to 
award the palm to Statius. A favorite eunuch 
named Earinus had cut off his hair and dedi- 
cated it to Aesculapius. Martial deals with this 
incident in four sportive little epigrams in the 



290 LATIN POETRY OF THE DECLINE 

ninth book, chiefly dwelling on the unsuitable- 
ness of the name to the Latin metres. Statius 
devotes to it a poem 1 nearly as long as Words- 
worth's immortal " Ode on Immortality," with 
elaborate mythological machinery. One cannot 
help thinking that victory, with such a subject and 
achieved by so laborious a method, is itself defeat. 
The result is much the same when we observe 
how each deals with another theme, a bronze statue 
of Hercules which had been owned by Alexander 
the Great, Hannibal, and Sulla, and was now the 
property of a Roman virtuoso, Novius Vindex. 2 
A better principle of comparison would be to ob- 
serve how high each can rise, and how low he can 
sink. Martial is often profoundly touching. He 
sometimes seems to mock his own sensibilities and 
those of his readers. As Heine sometimes seems 
ashamed of possessing human feelings, and, revers- 
ing the well-known Terentian phrase, delights in 
showing how alien to him is all that is human by 
putting a piece of cold cynicism beside some pro- 
found and pathetic reflection ; so Martial, having 
touched the most exquisite note in Byron's 

" O snatch'd away in beauty's bloom," — 
we mean the last couplet, 

"And thou who bidd'st me to forget, 
Thy cheeks are wan, thine eyes are wet," — 

concludes a noble poem with some lines of the 

1 Silv. III. 4. 

2 Mart. IX. 44, 45; Stat. Silv. IV. 6. 



MERIVALE ON THE FLAVIAN EPOCH 2gi 

foulest indecency. But he rises high though he 
chooses to stoop low. Statins never approaches 
the "pure serene " in which Martial sometimes is 
willing to float for a while, 1 and how miserably low 
he can fall will be evident to any one who reads 
the creeping Sapphics 2 in which he apostrophizes 
the condition of childlessness as " to be avoided by 
every effort," — 

" Orbitas omni fugienda nisu." 

Taking into consideration the absurdity of personi- 
fying and apostrophizing the condition of child- 
lessness, the grotesque feebleness and almost of- 
fensive tastelessness of the expression, and the 
imbecility of the sentiment, I should be disposed 

to pronounce this the very worst line in 

. 111.1 The worst 

Latin poetry, though others in the same line in Latin 

poem run it close in the race for this dis- poe iy ' 
tinction, especially the very next verse, in which 
childlessness is described as "buried with no tears " 
{orbitas nullo tumulata fletit), as if a father could 
enjoy the thought of his children weeping over his 
bier. 

Every one interested in Latin literature is fa- 
miliar with the excellent chapter (the 

Merivale on 

64th) in Merivale s "History of the Ro- the Flavian 
mans under the Empire," in which he epoc 

1 Perhaps the best piece of Statius is the prayer for sleep 
in Silv. V. 4, with which should be read a fine description of 
the abode of Sleep in Theb. X. 84 ff. 

2 Silv. IV. 7. 



292 LATIN POETRY OF THE DECLINE 

contrasts the Flavian with the foregoing literary 
epochs, and points out the influence of the pro- 
fessorial system established throughout the Em- 
pire by Vespasian. Dean Merivale remarks that 
the Flavian era was an age of positive thought, 
that the nymphs and heroes of Statius were copied 
from the courtiers of the Palatine, and the Medea 
of Valerius Flaccus was a virago of the imperial 
type, a Lollia or Agrippina. If Valerius Flac- 
cus and Silius Italicus had allowed their work to 
express more freely the spirit of their age, they 
would have been far more interesting and valuable 
to us now. But they seem to have resisted it stren- 
uously, and to have tried to use again the old 
poetic framework which was worn out and should 
have been abandoned. It was a great mistake 
when Silius Italicus, applying the supernatural ma- 
chinery of the Aeneid to a historical narrative, 
made Volturnus, sent by Aeolus at the prayer of 
Juno, blind the eyes of the Romans at Cannae, and 
when he depicted Venus as plunging the Romans 
into sloth at Capua. 

It would be useless even to attempt to charac- 
Later verse- terize the later verse-writers like Pru- 
wnters. dentius, whom Bentley strangely called 
the Virgil and Horace of the Christians, but of 
whom no more can justly be said than that he 
is the least bad among the Christian versifiers, 
though inferior to some of them, for instance to 
Juvencus, in the use of the language. But there 
is one very late poet of whom a word may be 



THE LATER VERSE-WRITERS 293 

said. Claudian's position in literature is unique. 
It is remarkable enough, as has been observed, 
that after three centuries of torpor the Latin 
muse should have revived in the reign of Hono- 
rius ; surprising that this revival should have been 
brought about by a foreigner, an Egyptian ; but 
most amazing of all that a justly won and endur- 
ing reputation should be founded on court poems, 
installation odes, and panegyrics on inconsiderable 
people in an uninteresting age. Gibbon says : 
" He was endowed with the rare and precious talent 
of raising the meanest, of adorning the most bar- 
ren, and of diversifying the most similar, topics." 
We may, perhaps, fitly conclude this lecture with a 
translation from Claudian in prose from the grace- 
ful pen of Professor Jebb, my predecessor in this 
Lectureship, whose taste, learning, eloquence, and 
judgment were, I feel sure, duly appreciated last 
year by this audience. It is an extract from the 
poem on the consulship of Stilicho, a. d. 400, a 
eulogy on the Empire of Rome. It is a splendid 
expression of what ought now to be the ambition 
and aspiration of at least one great empire and 
one great republic : — 

" She, she alone, has taken the conquered to her bosom, 
and has made men to be one household with one name, her- 
self their mother, not their empress, and has called her vas- 
sals citizens, and has linked far places in a bond of love. 
Hers is that large loyalty to which we owe it that the stranger 
walks in a strange land as if it were his own ; that men can 
change their homes ; that it is a pastime to visit Thule, and 
to expose mysteries at which we once shuddered ; that we 



294 LATIN POETRY OF THE DECLINE 

drink at will the waters of the Rhone and the Orontes ; that 
the whole earth is one people." 1 

1 " Haec est in gremium victos quae sola recepit, 
Humanumque genus communi nomine fovit 
Matris non dominae ritu, civesque vocavit 
Quos domuit, nexuque pio longinqua revinxit. 
Hujus pacificis debemus moribus omnes 
Quod veluti patriis regionibus utitur hospes; 
Quod sedem mutare licet ; quod cernere Thulen 
Lusus, et horrendos quondam penetrare recessus; 
Quod bibimus passim Rhodanum, potamus Orontem : 
Quod cuncti gens una sumus." 



APPENDIX. 

A very interesting account of the translators of Vir- 
gil into verse, up to his own time, was given by the late 
Professor Conington in the " Quarterly Review " for 
1861. 1 The most remarkable versions since that time 
have been first, of course, Conington's own translation 
of the " Aeneid" into the octosyllabic measure so success- 
fully used by Sir Walter Scott in his metrical romances ; 
and, more recently, the versions by Mr. William Morris, 
Canon Thornhill, and Lord Justice Sir Charles Bowen. 
Mr. Morris has adopted the long fourteen-syllabled 
metre of Chapman's " Homer," which had already been 
employed by an early translator of Virgil, Thomas Phaer 
(1558^-1573). I must own that I was disappointed with 
his "Aeneids of Virgil." One did not find in it that 
deftness of phrase-making and that easy command of 
rhythm which distinguish " The Earthly Paradise," 
and many of the sonnets of one to whom one unhesi- 
tatingly accords a place in the small and distinguished 
company of living poets. In the " Aeneids of Virgil " 
he was unfortunate in the choice of a subject. His 
chief gift is to be able to throw round his theme a kind 
of archaic halo, an old epic atmosphere, which is so 
skillfully generated that the reader wanders enchanted 
with his new guide through Hellenic and Alexandrine 
mythland. But this old-world tone, so invaluable to a 
translator of Homer, or even of Apollonius Rhodius, is 
entirely unsuitable to Virgil, who, in dealing with lan- 
1 No. 219, pp. 73~ IT 4- 



296 APPENDIX 

guage, is abreast of his age, or even in front of it; 
whose chief characteristics are a delicate intricacy of 
expression and a terse pointedness, the corruption of 
which generated the stilted poetry of silver Latin ity; 
whose style, in fine, far more readily suggests a com- 
parison with Mr. Ruskin or Matthew Arnold than with 
Sir Thomas Malory or Spenser. Hence the sense of 
incongruity inspired by such Wardour-Street English as 
eyen and clepe, and by such lines as, — 

" That thence a folk, kings far and wide, most noble lords of fight, 
Should come for bane of Libyan land : such web the Parcae 
dight ; " 1 
or 

" Unto the fatherland of storm, full fruitful of the gale, 
Aeolia hight, where Aeolus is king of all avail." 2 

I will give as a sample of his work the fine speech of 
Dido 3 after she has resolved to destroy herself, and I 
will put beside it the same passage from the two other 

most recent versions : — 

" Ah, Jove ! and is he gone ? 
And shall a very stranger mock the lordship I have won ? 
Why arm they not ? Why gather not from all the town in chase ? 
Ho ye ! Why run ye not the ships down from their standing place ? 
Quick, bring the fire ! shake out the sails ! hard on the oars to sea ! 
What words are these ? Or where am I ? What madness changeth 

me ? 
Unhappy Dido ! now at last thine evil deed strikes home. 
Ah, better when thou mad'st him lord — lo whereunto are come 
His faith and troth who erst, they say, his country's house gods 

held, 
The while he took upon his back his father spent with eld ? 
Why ! might not I have shred him up and scattered him piecemeal 
About the sea, and slain his friends, his very son, with steel, 
Ascanius on his father's board for dainty meat to lay ? 
But doubtful, say ye, were the fate of battle ? Yea, O yea ! 
1 Aeneid, I. 21, 22. 2 I. 51, 52. 8 IV. 590-629. 



APPENDIX 297 



What might I fear, who was to die — if I had borne the fire 
Among their camp, and filled his decks with flame, and son and 

sire 
Quenched with their whole folk, and myself had cast upon it all ! 

Lo this I pray, this last of words forth with my blood I pour, 
And ye, O Tyrians, 'gainst his race that is, and is to be, v 

Feed full your hate ! When I am dead send down this gift to me : 
No love betwixt the peoples twain, no troth for anything ! 
And thou, Avenger of my wrongs, from my dead bones outspring, 
To bear the fire and the sword o'er Dardan-peopled earth 
Now or hereafter ; whensoe'er the day brings might to birth. 
I pray the shore against the shore, the sea against the sea, 
The sword 'gainst sword — fight ye that are, and ye that are to be!" 

Put beside this the version of Sir C. Bowen, which, in 
its plain, manly, straightforward vigor, affords a strong 
contrast to the artificial simplicity of Mr. Morris's verses, 
and which would be in many respects adequate except 
for the metre : — 

" Father of Earth and of Heaven ! and shall this stranger, she cries, 
Wend on his treacherous way, float Dido's realm as he flies ? ^^/ 

Leaps no sword from the scabbard ? Is Tyre not yet on his trail ? / 
None of ye warping the ships from the dockyards,hoisting the sail? 
Forth with the flame and the arrow! To sea and belabor the 



main 



Ah, wild words ! Is it Dido ? Has madness troubled her brain ? 
Ah, too late, poor Dido ! The sin comes home to thee now ! 
Then was the hour to consider, when thou wast crowning his brow. 
Look ye ! The faith and honor of him who still, as they say, 
Carries on shipboard with him his Trojan gods on the way ! 
Bore on his shoulders his aged sire ! Ah, had I not force 
Limb from limb to have torn him, and piecemeal scattered his 

corse 
Over the seas ? His crews to have slain, and, banquet of joy, 
Served on the father's table the flesh of lulus the boy ? 
Even were chance in the battle unequal, — death was at hand. 
Whom had Dido to fear ? I had borne to his vessels the brand, 



298 APPENDIX 



Filled with flames each deck, each hold, — child, people, and sire 
Whelmed in a blazing ruin, and flung myself on the pyre ! 
This last prayer as my life ebbs forth I pour with my blood ; 
Let not thy hatred sleep, my Tyre, to the Tenerian brood : 
Lay on the tomb of Dido for funeral offering this ! 
Neither be love nor league to unite my people and his ! 
Rise ! thou Nameless Avenger from Dido's ashes to come, 
Follow with fire and slaughter the false Dardanians home ! 
Smite them to-day, hereafter, through ages yet unexplored, 
Long as thy strength sustains thee, and fingers cling to the sword ! 
Sea upon sea wage battle forever ! Shore upon shore, 
Spear upon spear ! To the sires and children strife evermore ! " 

The same passage as translated by Canon Thornhill 
well illustrates the extreme vigor of his work, whilst it 
labors under the characteristic defect of diffuseness : — 

" Shall he then go ? Go, and our kingdom left 
Insulted, mocked, to point a rover's scoff ! 
What, lieges, ho ! — Will they not arm and out, 
All Carthage, quick ? Not chase the faithless foe ? 
Nor pluck those laggard vessels from the docks? 
Away ! forth fire and sword ! ply sail and oar ! — 
Yet hold ; what words are these ? where, what this place ? 
What madness whirls my brain ? Ah, wretched queen, 
Needs guilty deed to touch thy dainty sense ? 
Late wail'd what 's done ; wise hadst thou rued in time, 
When heart and sceptre at thy giving lay. 
Mirror of knighthood's truth ! and this is he, 
The world-famed prince that ever with him bears 
His country's god about! the model son, 
Who on his back did safe from foes bear off 
The helpless burden of his aged sire ! 
Might not this hand — fool, to forbear the deed ! — 
Have shred his mangled carcase to the waves, 
Slain friends and followers, yea, done to death 
Ascanius' self, and at the father's board 
Have served him up his murdered boy to boot ? 
True, 't were to fight at risk ; but what of that ? 
Self-doom'd to death, whom — what — had I to fear ? 



APPENDIX 299 



No ; I had fired their fleet, each gangway filled, 
And, smothering deck with flame, slain sire and son, 
With all the cursed brood extinct, and crowned 
The blazing ruin with myself and mine ! 

Such wish take he from me, this parting curse 

Here with my streaming blood to Heaven I pour, 

Then, Tyrians, you with endless feud still vex 

His seed, breed, kind, — yea, all shall ever trace 

His caitiff line ; with this meet tribute still 

Present your Dido's tomb. Be love nor league 

Your hostile realms betwixt ! O from our dust — 

Hear, righteous Heaven, the prayer!. — some Champion start, 

Some bold Avenger, doomed with fire and sword 

To hunt those Trojan vagrants through the world, 

Be it to-day, to-morrow, or whene'er ; 

No time unmeet shall will and means supply; 

Fight shore with shore opposed, wave fight with wave, 

Fight all — who — what — or are, or e'er shall be ! " 

The several renderings of this passage seem to me 
about as characteristic of the merits and defects of the 
several authors as any one could have chosen. One 
might have selected more favorable specimens of the 
powers of Sir Charles Bowen and Canon Thornhill. 

Here is a passage 1 in which the former very skill- 
fully reproduces that sympathy which the face and 
voice of Nature awaken in the poet : — 

" Come, Galatea, where in the waves can a merriment be? 
Here are the golden blooms of spring ; earth bountiful, see, 
Here by the river scatters her bright-hued flow'rs evermore, 
Over the cavern hangs one poplar of silvery white, 
Lissom vines have woven a roof that shades it from light ; 
Come ! Let the madcap billows in thunder break on the shore." 

In the last lines of Jupiter's speech in the first book 2 
the translator rises with the poet : — 

-43. 2 Aeneid, I. 286-296, 



300 APPENDIX 



" Then Caesar of Troy's bright blood shall be born 
Bounding his throne by the ocean, his fame by the firmament floor 
Julius hight, from lulus, his great forefather of yore. 
Thine ere long to receive him in heaven, thy fears at an end 
Laden with Eastern trophies. To him, too, vows shall ascend. 
Rude Time, waxing mellow, shall lay fierce battles aside, 
White-haired Faith, with Vesta, Quirinus, and Remus allied, 
Rule with justice the nations, and speedily War's grim gates 
Close with their iron bolts and their iron-riveted plates. 
Sinful Rebellion within, an imprisoned Fury, the while 
Piling her fiendish weapons, shall sit firm bound on the pile, 
Hands in a thousand fetters behind her manacled fast, 
Blood-red lips still yelling her thunder-yells to the blast." 

I have not space for as many extracts as I would 
gladly make, and I must refer you to the sombre strain 
which tells of the descent into Hell, 1 beginning, — 

" So unseen in the darkness they went by night on the road 
Down the unpeopled kingdom of Death and his ghostly abode ; " 

and to the splendid speech of Anchises at the end of 
the sixth book, of which I can only quote the closing 
lines : — 

" Child of a nation's sorrow ! if thou canst baffle the Fates' 
Bitter decrees, and break for a while their barrier gates, 
Thine to become Marcellus ! I pray thee bring me anon 
Handfuls of lilies, that I bright flowers may strew on my son, 
Heap on the shade of the boy unborn these gifts at the least, 
Doing the dead, tho' vainly, the last sad service. He ceased." 

Sir Charles Bowen has also been very successful in 
couplets here and there, in which he has managed to 
preserve great spirit in an absolutely literal rendering, 
as for instance, — 

" Far on the watery waste he beheld Troy's company driven, 
Trojans crushed by the waves and the wrack and ruin of heaven; " 2 
1 Aeneid, VI. 268-281. 2 I. 128. 



APPENDIX 301 



and — 

"Come, let us perish, and charge to the heart of the enemies' line. 
One hope only remains for the conquered, — hope to resign." 1 

Canon Thornhill is perhaps most successful in Dido's 
fierce denunciation of her faithless lover : 2 — 

" Nor goddess gave thee birth, false-hearted wretch, 
Nor Dardanus thy miscreant kind begot, 
But thou from flinty Caucasus wast hewn, 
Congenial grain ! and tigers gave thee suck. 
Yes, why mince words, and wait for baser wrong? 
What ! see me weep, nor heave one kindly sigh ! 
Moved he those eyes ? shed he one answering tear ? 
Yea, was e'en pity to my pangs denied ? 
But why note this or that, or how award 
The palm for worst where barbarous all alike ? 
Ay me ! not man alone — not Juno now, 
Nor Jove himself, hath ruth of wretches' wrong ! 
Yes, yes ; no trusting more of Earth or Heaven. 
This ingrate I, what time our angry waves 
Flung out the needy waif upon these shores, 
Not housed alone and fed, but bade him share — 
Ah, fool ! — my throne and state, and snatched withal 
His shattered barks and starving crews from death. 
Ha ! that way madness lies — my brain 's afire ! 
'T is Phoebus now — 't is now some Lycian seer — 
Anon — and special sent of Jove himself — 
E'en Heaven's own herald cleaves his aery way 
To bear the dread command. Yes, fitting task, 
Belike, for god's employ ! such cares — 't is apt ! — 
Must ruffle Heaven's repose ! But I, good sooth, 
Nor court thy stay nor deign thy lies refute." 

This very spirited rendering of the Dublin scholar 

is, it must be owned, affluent to diffuseness, containing 

ten lines more than the Latin, and it will be noticed 

that there is a heightening of the tone which almost 

1 Aeneid, II. 353. 2 IV. 365-380. 



302 APPENDIX 

amounts to exaggeration. "Wretch," "miscreant," 
" barbarous," are not in the Latin, and dicta is not 
lies ; on the other hand, " that way madness lies " is very 
happily adopted from " King Lear." Conington, with 
his shorter measure, uses one line less. I quote his 
rendering to show that, with all his skill, in a really 
impassioned passage his ambling metre drags him 
down : — 

" No goddess bore thee, traitorous man : 
No Dardanus your race began ; 
No ; 't was from Caucasus you sprung, 
And tigers nursed you with their young. 
Why longer wear the mask, as though 
I waited for some heavier blow ? 
Heaved he one sigh at tears of mine ? 
Moved he those hard impassive eyne ? 
Did one kind drop of pity fall 
At thought of her who gave him all ? 
What first, what last ? Now, now I know 
Queen Juno's self has turned my foe : 
Not e'en Saturnian Jove is just : 
No faith on earth, in heaven no trust. 
A shipwrecked wanderer up and down, 
I made him share my home, my crown : 
His shattered fleet, his needy crew 
From fire and famine's jaws I drew. 
Ah, Furies whirl me ! now divine 
Apollo, now the Lycian shrine, 
Now Heaven's own herald comes, to bear 
His grisly mandate through the air ! 
Aye, gods above ply tasks like these ; 
Such cares disturb their life of ease. — 
I loathe your person, scorn your pleas." 

Both Sir Charles Bowen and Canon Thornhill are 
thoroughly trustworthy in point of scholarship. Both 
show a careful and judicious use of the admirable com- 



APPENDIX 303 

mentary of Conington and Nettleship, and in the case 
of the former one can discern an independent power of 
insight and apprehension. Hence the misconceptions 
of the earlier translators have disappeared from the 
work of the Lord Justice and the Canon. Thus, in 
" Aeneid," IV. 11, Conington makes it quite clear that, 
when Dido exclaims, 

" Quern sese ore ferens ! quam forti pectore et armis ! " 

she is expressing her admiration of the stout chest and 
broad shoulders of Aeneas; 1 so Enid, as she looks on 
her sleeping lord, cries, — 

" O noble breast and all-puissant arms ! " 

In accordance with this interpretation, which is cer- 
tainly right, Sir Charles Bowen renders, — 

"Who is the stranger come to our palace halls as a guest ? 
Princely his bearing, — a hero's arms and a hero's breast." 

And Canon Thornhill : ■ — 

" What face and mien — did'st mark ? — and bearing high, 
What noble breast and stalwart might of arm ! " 

No doubt Lord Tennyson had this passage in his 
mind when he wrote the lines which I have quoted 
from " Enid and Geraint ; " the poet saw the real mean- 
ing of a passage which was misapprehended by the 
earlier commentators, who made ar?nis " deeds of arms, 
warlike achievements." In " Cymbeline " ( IV. 2, 308), 
Imogen, in her grief, dwells even more forcibly on physi- 
cal endowments : — 

"The garments of Posthumus ! 
I know the shape of 's leg ; this is his hand; 
His foot Mercurial ; his Martial thigh ; 
The brawns of Hercules." 
1 Armis comes from armus, " a shoulder," not from arma. 



304 APPENDIX 



The prett) T phrase, radiisque retexerit or&em, 1 is as 
prettily turned by Sir C. Bowen into " uncurtains the 
land;" and vir gregis ipse caper 2 really gains point as 
" our sultan goat." But he is completely surpassed by 
the Dublin translator in turning 

" A st ego quae divum incedo regina." 3 

Nothing could be better than 

" I who queen it through these courts of heaven." 

How poor beside this is Sir C. Bowen's — 

" I who in high heaven move as a queen ; " 

and Conington's — 

" I who through heaven its mistress move ; " 

and Morris's — 

" I who go for the queen of the gods." 

Canon Thornhill is, I think, guided by a true in- 
stinct in appropriating, when it is ready to his hand, 
some happy classicism of Tennyson or Milton. For 
instance, — 

" This way and that dividing the swift mind " 

is far better than Sir C. Bowen's — 

" Hither and thither he hurries his thought ; " 

aetheria lapsa plaga is exactly " stoop'd from his aery 
tour ; " to to praeceps se corpore ad iindus mersit very 
probably suggested " throws his steep flight," and may 
therefore fairly be restored to its owner. Less obvious, 
but as pleasing, is Canon Thornhill's adoption of Shake- 
3 Aeneid, IV 119. 2 Eel. VII. 7. 3 Aeneid, I. 46. 



APPENDIX 305 

speare's " a pliant hour " for mollissima fandi temporal 
and, for another passage, 2 of Milton's 

" Towards heaven's descent doth slope his west'ring wheel." 

He would have done well to apply the same principle 
oftener. Virgil's delicate expression, — 

" Solane perpetua moerens carpere juventa," 3 — 

has no closer parallel than Shakespeare's " withering 
on the virgin thorn." 

Again, in " Aeneid," IV. 530, — 

" Aut pectore noctem 
Accipit," 

the translators have failed to take advantage of Lord 
Tennyson's musical echo, — 

" She ever failed to draw 
The quiet night into her blood." 

But the chief defect of both these excellent works 
lies in the metre • and the metre is all-important in re- 
producing the effect of the original poem. " Art thou 
that Virgil ? " — the question of Dante — must be put 
to every adventurous spirit who attempts to clothe Vir- 
gil in the garb of a new tongue. And we must answer 
No, if an unsuitable metre is chosen, or a suitable me- 
tre is inadequately handled. 

The Dublin translator has*chosen the metre which is, 
perhaps, better fitted than any other, except perhaps 
the heroic couplet, to give the impression of the Latin 
hexameter ; but my readers will have seen already that 

1 Aeneid, IV. 293. 

2 " Devexo interea propior fit vesper Olympo." — VIII. 280. 

8 IV. 32. 



306 APPENDIX 

he has not mastered that most elusive of arts, the power 
to make blank verse sing. It is impossible by any 
analysis to fix the quality or qualities which make the 
" Idylls of the King " poetry, while the " Epic of 
Hades" is merely measured prose. Mr. Worsley, in 
his preface to his " Iliad," attempts to tell us what 
blank verse means : " An essential condition to its ex- 
istence is, that not the line only, but the whole sentence 
and paragraph, should really scan. A series of blank 
lines, though each line in itself may be full of merit, is 
no more blank verse than good bricks are of necessity 
a good structure." 

Now the Dublin scholar often gives admirable lines, 
but his translation as a whole has the cadence of the 
" Epic of Hades " — to which, be it observed, he points 
as one of the models of English blank verse — rather 
than that of " Paradise Lost " or " Tithonus." Dr. 
Symmons, who early in the last century essayed with 
poor success to surpass Dryden in the use of his own 
weapon, the heroic couplet, speaks of blank verse 
" as only a laborious and doubtful struggle to escape 
from the fangs of prose ; " adding that, " if it ever ven- 
tures to relax into simple and natural phraseology, it 
instantly becomes the prey of its pursuer." Dr. John- 
son must have been under the influence of a somewhat 
similar feeling when he advised poets who did not 
think themselves capable of astonishing, but only aimed 
at pleasing, to condescend to rhyme. Dr. Henry, on 
the other hand, regards rhyming as a crime : " Drunk- 
enness is an aggravation of, not an excuse for, the out- 
rages of the drunkard ; rhyme is an aggravation of, not 
an excuse for, the outrages of the rhymester." The 
Dublin Canon is far from clipping the wings of his 



APPENDIX 307 



ambition in the fashion suggested by Dr. Johnson. His 
aim is often to astonish, and he has not failed in some- 
times achieving it. He is never dull or bald, and we 
can hardly say as much for any other blank-verse 
translation of Virgil, from that of the ill-fated Earl of 
Surrey to the recent version by Mr. Rickards and Lord 
Ravensworth. But Canon Thornhill has one grievous 
sin. He is diffuse, and Virgil is the most condensed 
of poets. Now, he who essays " the poet's chiming 
close " has some excuse for diffuseness. Rhyme is a 
mocking fiend, a wicked Siren, who allures her victims 
into her toils and then enjoys their struggles. Rhyme 
can plead no justification for herself. There never was 
and never will be any reason why thought should ex- 
press itself in words which produce a certain assonance 
at certain intervals. Yet, as was said of dicing in 
ancient Rome, it will ever be forbidden and ever prac- 
ticed. Diffuseness is one of the witch's imps. It will 
always be true, as was said by the witty author of 
" Hudibras," that 

" Those who write in rhyme still make 
The one verse for the other's sake ; 
For one for sense and one for rhyme 
They think 's sufficient at one time." 

This is the genesis of the second verse in the couplet by 
which Dryden translated tantaene animis caelestibus 
irae : — 

" Can heavenly minds such high resentment show, 
Or exercise their spite in human woe ? " 

The same may be said of the last lines in Pope's 
" Iliad : "— 

" Such honors Ilion to her hero paid, 
And peaceful slept the mighty Hector's shade" 



308 APPENDIX 



And the same imp, when Johnson had expressed ad- 
mirably in one verse a well-known Juvenalian gnome, 1 — 

" Slow rises worth by poverty oppressed," 
hitched on a tag of pitiful bathos : — 

" This moitrnful truth is everywhere confessed" 

But the wielder of blank verse is without excuse for dif- 
fuseness ; yet we find that in the passage above, on 
which we compared Sir C. Bowen, Canon Thornhill, 
and Mr. Morris, the Latin being twenty-five lines in 
length, Mr. Morris has twenty-six verses, Sir Charles 
Bowen twenty-seven, and Canon Thornhill forty-one. 
No doubt his measure is shorter than theirs, but Co- 
nington, with his shorter octosyllabics, has two verses 
less, and Mr. Rickards, using the same metre, gives only 
thirty-one verses. The version by Mr. Rickards and 
Lord Ravensvrorth has the merits as well as the defects 
which arise from a recoil from exuberance. It may 
fairly claim to be the most condensed translation of the 
" Aeneid " which has appeared. Of course the hex- 
ameter, which averages fifteen syllables, cannot always 
be compressed into a ten-syllabled line ; but their ren- 
dering goes as far as possible in this direction. Lord 
Ravensworth defies all comers to turn into one heroic 
verse the last line in the description of the shield of 
Aeneas : 2 — 

" Indomitique Dahae et pontem indignatus Araxes," 
or the less ambitious 

" Troe's, Agyllinique, et pictis Arcades armis." 3 

1 " Haud facile emergunt quorum virtutibus obstat 
Res angusta domi." — Sat. III. 164. 
, 2 Aeneid, VIII. 728. 3 XII. 281. 



APPENDIX 309 

" Blank verse really deserving of the name," writes 
Conington in his preface, "I believe to be impossible, 
except to one or two eminent writers in a generation." 
With this opinion I heartily agree. Of Englishmen 
during the last generation, probably not one but Ten- 
nyson and Mr. Swinburne could produce blank verse 
which would be a worthy counterpart of 

" The stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man." 

Of the metre which Conington himself has adopted, 
the less said the better. It has spoiled an admirable 
performance. Inextricably entangled as it is in our 
minds with three subjects, — the biting invective of Swift 
and Butler, the Oriental love-tales of Byron, and the 
Border warfare of Scott, — it would offend us even if, 
in itself and apart from associations, it was fitted to be 
an equivalent for the varied and long-drawn roll of the 
" Aeneid." But it is absolutely in itself unsuitable. 

" I admit," says the Bishop of Derry, 1 " that Scott 
can do wonders with the octosyllabic line, when the 
trumpet of battle is in his ears, or when his spirit gallops 
with the hunter in the storm of chase along the hills. 
I admit that Byron has sometimes breathed into it the 
tempest of his passion, and Wordsworth the chastened 
wisdom of his meditative morality. But I maintain that 
there are incurable defects in the measure for a long and 
serious poem. It cannot be sustained at a high pitch. 
Its fatal facility is a perpetual temptation." 

Dr. Henry protests with characteristic impetuosity 
against setting Virgil a-chorusing with Hieland caterans. 
W 7 e must own our participation to some degree in the 

1 In a lecture given as one of a series of Lectures on Literature 
and Art delivered in Dublin in 1868. 



3IO APPENDIX 

feeling which makes Dr. Alexander so eloquent and Dr. 
Henry so indignant. Every metre has its own peculiar 
associations. The terza rima of Dante and the ottava 
rima of Pulci belong, in the phrase of Schiller, to dif- 
ferent jurisdictions. Would any sane man think of turn- 
ing " Childe Harold " into the measure of " Hudibras," 
or the " Battle of Chevy Chase " into the Spenserian 
stanza ? Scott contended that, certain superfluous words 
being omitted, the first two verses of Pope's " Iliad " 
would run better in octosyllabics, thus : — 

" Achilles' wrath, to Greece the spring 
Of woes unnumbered, Goddess, sing." 

But the omitted words are not superfluous. They per- 
form a most important function in retarding the metre, 
and bringing in with the heroic couplet a dignity which 
is lost in the octosyllabic scurry. If the Muse appeared 
in answer to such an invocation, she should come with 
the tripping step of a slipshod waiting-maid answering a 
bell. But what shall we say of the metre which Sir 
Charles Bowen has employed ? I cannot help feeling 
that here, too, a fine piece of work has been spoiled by 
the metre. Sir Charles pleads for it that it is the Latin 
hexameter shorn of a syllable, since Coleridge's line, — 

" In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column," — 

would become, if the final dissyllable were replaced by 
a single syllable, — 

" In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery spray." 

Against this plea one would be disposed to urge that 
the hexameter is not a metre at all unless it is scanned 
by quantity, and the English hexameter does not even 
suggest rhythm except to those who are familiar with 



APPENDIX 311 



Greek and Latin poetry, and these it offends. So that 
to me at least it seems that there is nothing gained by 
an approximation to the so-called English hexameter. 
Moreover, the dropping of the final syllable altogether 
revolutionizes the whole character of the metre, which, 
after the change, ceases to suggest the hexameter at all. 
Each metre has its own character, its own expression, 
which it may preserve under considerable modification, 
but to which the slightest readjustment may prove fatal, 
just as a slight injury may completely change the ex- 
pression of a human face, which a much more serious 
lesion might leave unaltered. We feel that we have an 
iambic line of the Miltonic form in Tennyson's — 
" Ruining along the illimitable inane," 

though it would be hard to mark the five beats. We 
might many times read or recite — 

" And Sorrow's faded form and Solitude behind" 

without observing that it was a Greek senarius wanting 
a caesura. Let us take an English line with the meas- 
ure and caesura of a Greek senarius, and it does not 
strike our ear as being metrical at all. 

" And know by heart the congress of the nightly stars " 

is a line in the late Professor Kennedy's translation of 
-the " Agamemnon." It is in the very model of a Greek 
senarius, but it seems to our ear mere prose. Now, just 
as the twelve-syllabled iambic verse must in English 
fall into two equal parts, as in — 

" And Sorrow's faded form | and Solitude behind," 

so the verse which Sir Charles has chosen is either no 
metre at all, or it is the metre which Swinburne has 



312 APPENDIX 

used so grandly in the " Song in Time of Revolu- 
tion : " — 

" The heart of the rulers is sick, and the High Priest covers his 
head, 
For this is the song of the quick which is heard rrfthe ears of the 
dead." 

Each line falls into two parts, and Swinburne has em- 
phasized this essential quality in the metre by marking 
the end of the first part as well as the second with a 
rhyme. This rule is observed by Sir Charles Bowen, 
whether it be by chance or design, in many, perhaps 
most, of his lines, but it ought never to be violated. 
His poem would then be written in anapaestic measure, 
and would not attempt, as it vainly does in its present 
form, to remind the reader of the measure of the 
" Aeneid." Here are some verses which we should 
find it difficult to scan. We may say of them with 
Touchstone : " This is the very false gallop of verses : 
why do you infect yourself with them ? " — 

" Thither crossed the Achaeans and hidden on its desolate beach." 1 

" Slowly at last by the Ithacan's thunders driven to divine." 2 

" Blindly to enter the havens that appear so nigh on the main." 3 

Very disagreeable, too, are the frequent introduction of 
the triple rhyme, and the alternation of the rhyme when 
the ear is accustomed to the couplet. Sometimes 4 we 
meet the distant rhyme-recurrences of a sonnet. 
" Imperio laeti parent et jussa facessunt " 5 

is not a very striking verse, but it ought to find a place 
in the translation. On the other hand, Sir Charles is 

1 Aeneid, II. 24. 2 I. 128. 3 III. 382. 

4 VI. 607-613. 6 IV. 295. 



APPENDIX 313 



not justified in importing into a passage a sentiment 
not to be found there. 

" Nor shall I ever tire of remembering Dido the sweet " 
is far more loving than 

" Nee me meminisse pigebit Elissae." 1 

One would have welcomed such a symptom of tender- 
ness in the Man of Destiny, but no such soft word ever 
passed his cold lips. Still less did he say, when he 
appealed to his deserted mistress in the Shades : 2 — 

" Tarry, and turn not away from a face that on thine would dwell ; 
'T is thy lover thou flies t y and this is our last farewell ! " 

What he said was : — 

" Siste gradum, teque adspectu ne subtrahe nostro ; 
Quern fugis ? Extremum fato quod te alloquor hoc est." 

Projecere animas is rendered " strewed their lives on 
the sands," but this is only the tribute exacted by 
rhyme, and must be classed with "the mazy lev'ret," 
" earth's soft arms," and " the stars of the blue Aegean," 
which Messrs. Butcher and Lang resent in the metrical 
versions of Homer. As we are dealing with matters 
of detail, we may add that " Ascan " seems to us a 
dangerous experiment. Robert Andrews (1766) gave us 
Daphny, Philly, Thyrse, Lyke (for Lycus), and Jutna (for 
Juturna), but his precedent has been rightly neglected. 
To estimate broadly the work of Lord Justice Bowen, 
one would say that he has produced in his translation 
a work of high literary art, and that his finished schol- 
arship, sound judgment, and perfect taste would have 
achieved an ideal translation if he had chosen a better 
1 Aeneid, IV. 335. 2 VI. 465. 



3 H APPENDIX 

metre, and been more uniformly careful in the handling 
of it. 

Of recent critical and exegetical labors on Virgil, by 
far the most important work is Dr. Henry's " Aeneidea." 
Dr. James Henry was elected a scholar of Trinity Col- 
lege, Dublin, in the year 1817, and graduated in 18 19. 
For some years he practised as a physician in Dublin, 
but before he reached middle life he abandoned the 
practice of his profession, and devoted all his leisure 
and most of his ample means to the prosecution of Vir- 
gilian inquiry. Like Varro, " the most learned of the 
Romans," he pursued the footsteps of Aeneas whither- 
soever his fated wanderings had led him. Styx only 
with nine-fold coil set a bound to the feet of this enthu- 
siastic follower of the Trojan hero. The first fruit of 
his labors was a translation of the first two books of 
the " Aeneid" into blank verse, published in Dublin in 
1845. This was followed by a rather bizarre transcript 
of the sense of the first six books in highly diversified 
measures under the quaint title of " Six Photographs of 
the Heroic Times " (Dresden, 1853). The inquiries re- 
quisite for the execution of that task produced " Notes 
of a Twelve Years' Voyage of Discovery in the First 
Six Books of the Aeneis " (Dresden, 1853). This vol- 
ume was brought out in German in an abridged form 
in the Gottingen "Philologus" in 1857, under the title 
" Adversaria Virgiliana." Probably he would have 
continued to use that medium of publication if the 
editor of the " Philologus " had not protested against 
Dr. Henry's omission of all accents and breathings 
in his Greek quotations. The editor offered to supply 
the accents and breathings himself, but Dr. Henry was 
obdurate; he would have none of "those schoolboy 



APPENDIX 315 



scratchings, those grotesque and disfiguring additamen ta 
of the grammarians." Fleckeisen, on his side, was (very 
properly) inflexible, and the "Adversaria" ceased to 
appear. Dr. Henry, in his preface to the " Aeneidea," 
thus describes the subsequent course of his studies : — 

" My love for the subject, instead of diminishing, in- 
creased with years, how much owing to the mere influ- 
ence of habit, how much to the approbation with which 
my labors, imperfect as they were, had been received 
by competent judges both in England and on the con- 
tinent of Europe, and especially in Germany, how much 
owing to a consciousness of the daily increasing facility 
with which I brushed away, or imagined I brushed 
away, from my author's golden letters some of the dust 
accumulated on them during the lapse of nearly twenty 
centuries, I shall not take it on me to say. But cer- 
tain it is, that it is only with increasing love and zeal 
I have since 1857 not merely re-wrought the whole of 
the old ground, but taken in the entirely new ground 
of the last six books, and increased the previously very 
imperfect collection of variae lectiones by the insertion 
in their proper places of those of all the first-class 
MSS. carefully collated by myself and daughter in two 
journeys made to Italy for the express purpose, and of 
ten, being all that were of any importance, of the 
Paris MSS." 

The first volume of the "Aeneidea" was published 
in 1873, the second in 1878, under the editorship of the 
late John F. Davies, M. A., of Trinity College, Dublin, 
and Professor of Latin in Queen's College, Galway. 
It is a monumental work. Disfigured as it is by much 
eccentricity of typography and style, by many more or 
less irrelevant (though generally eloquently and bril- 



3l6 APPENDIX 



liantly written) digressions, by exaggerated acerbity of 
tone, and some undue obtrusion of the writer's person- 
ality, it forms, nevertheless, perhaps the most valuable 
body of original comment and subtle analysis which 
has ever been brought together for the illustration of a 
Latin poet. All the MSS. of Virgil written in capitals 
he has collated from beginning to end, some of them — 
the Vatican fragment, the Roman, the Palatine, and the 
Medicean — twice over. Of the second class of MSS., 
those not written in capitals, he has collated the Lau- 
ren tian, Vatican, Paris, and Dublin, from beginning to 
end, the others only after the end of the sixth book. 
But it is in his interpretation and illustration that he 
has done such inestimable work. Having command of 
an extremely vigorous and affluent style of English, he 
is able to put in the most forcible and attractive form 
the discoveries achieved by his keen insight and culti- 
vated taste ; but he is unfortunately a revolutionary by 
constitution, and too often steps out of his path to have 
a tilt with some usage or belief which seems to offend 
him, chiefly because it is long established and generally 
respected. His commentary on the first verse of the 
" Aeneid," which he strenuously maintains to be, — 

" Ille ego, qui quondam gracili modulatus avena," 

runs to 104 pages, being interrupted by a parergon of 
28 pages in smaller type, in which he assails the first 
thirteen lines of Conington's verse translation. This 
rather ponderous jeu d' esprit, with its cumbrous dra- 
matic machinery, whereby Priscian, Zumpt, Bopp, and 
Lindley Murray are introduced as interlocutors, would 
go far to induce a reader of taste to close the volume, 
especially when he found Dr. Henry railing at Coning- 
ton in a dozen verses, beginning, — 



APPENDIX 317 



"I do not like thee, Juno fell, 
The reason why I know full well," 

for using "fell " to render saevae in the fourth verse of 
the " Aeneid," and then seriously giving " vixen " as a 
more suitable epithet. But the reader would have rea- 
son to regret it if he allowed this buffoonery to drive 
him away from such a treasure-house of learning. The 
first volume (864 pp.) finishes the first book, the second 
(861 pp.) takes us to the end of the fourth. The third 
contains the commentary as far as the tenth book, and 
a fourth volume concludes the work. 

The criticism of Virgil has, as a rule, flowed in an 
easy channel with little alteration of the text, and the 
originality of editors has shown itself in refinement of 
exegesis. The edition of Ribbeck, however, affords a 
notable exception to this rule, and is not adapted to in- 
spire us with a respect for German taste and judgment, 
however much we may admire German erudition. Per- 
haps his most demonstrably absurd conjecture is on 
ciimulatam morte re?nittam, x a passage of recognized 
difficulty, where, reading mo7tte for morte, and quoting 
the proverbial magnos promittere monies in its defense, he 
puts into the mouth of Dido an expression which, if 
justifiable at all, would be worthy only of some swagger- 
ing Palaestrio or Geta of the comic stage. " To promise 
huge mountains " might be an intelligible though rather 
vulgar proverbial expression, meaning to make promises 
as "big as mountains," while "to send one away 
crowned with the reward of a mountain " would most 
probably be ludicrous in the highest degree to the ear 
of a contemporary of Virgil. Conington remarks that 
there is nothing so hazardous as to try to manipulate a 
1 Aeneid, IV. 436. 



318 APPENDIX 



familiar proverb by varying the expression, and that 
half the blunders made by foreigners in essaying a 
strange tongue turn on experiments of that kind. An 
Indian Baboo, 1 describing the sorrow felt by the family 
at the death of the subject of his memoir, wrote, " The 
house presented a second Babel, or a pretty kettle of 
fish." Ribbeck's cumulatam monte remittam would prob- 
ably have appeared as ludicrous to an Augustan Roman 
as the English of Mookerjee seems to us. Still more 
amusing is his conjecture on " Aeneid," XII. 55, — 

" At regina, nova pugnae conterrita sorte, 
Flebat, et ardentem generum moritura tenebat," 

where, by changing moritura to monitura, he makes the 
Queen-mother Amata cling to Turnus, not full of the 
presage of impending death, but primed with a lecture ! 

1 Memoir of the late Honorable Justice Onoocool Chunder 
Mookerjee, by Mohindro Nauth Mookerjee, his nephew; Cal- 
cutta, 1876. This delightful specimen of Baboo English was largely 
noticed by the London press on its appearance. Here are a few 
more choice specimens of his style : " His first business on making 
an income was to extricate his family from the difficulties in which 
it had been lately enwarped, and to restore happiness and sunshine 
to those sweet and well-beloved faces on which he had not seen the 
soft and fascinating beams of a simper for many a grim-visaged 
year." " This was the first time that we see a Pleader taking a 
seat in the Bengal Legislative Council solely by dint of his own 
legal weapon ; and he was an an fait, and therefore undoubtedly a 
transcendental lucre to the Council." "Justice Mookerjee very 
well understood the boot of his client, for which he would carry a 
logomachy as if his wheel of fortune depended upon it, or even 
more than that." " His elevation created a catholic ravishment 
throughout the domain." " When a boy he was filamentous but 
gradually in the course of time he became plump as a partridge." 
Let editors think of Mookerjee when they propose to introduce 
the language of every-day life into an epic in a foreign tongue. 



APPENDIX 319 



On certain others of Ribbeck's textual corrections, 
capsos for capias 1 and aliam for Mam 2 I will quote the 
criticism of Dr. Henry, as it quite coincides with my 
own judgment, and gives withal a characteristic sample 
of his manner : — 

" But what 's this ? The waste and barren syrtis of 
Ribbeck's orthographical varieties is passed, and yon- 
der before us opens the splendid mirage of his conjectu- 
ral emendations. I see island-dotted seas and lakes 
. . . and Ribbeck gigantic in the midst, building — no, 
not temples, not castles, but capsi for those twelve wild 
swans you see, wheeling round and round high above 
him in the air, and not minding either him or his capsi. 
Is he deaf, and does n't hear their singing? Or is it 
possible he does n't know that singing swans never live 
in capsi ? And now the capsi are finished, and the swans 
have flown away, and Ribbeck, nothing daunted, is as 
intent on a search for Aeneas's twentieth ship, as he was 
just now on building capsi for twelve wild swans. . . . 
No matter how the MSS. cry out U110 ore, ' You lie, 
you lie ! ' and ' Shame ! shame ! ' it is the twentieth, 
not the nineteenth ship of Aeneas which is devoured by 
the vortex, and Virgil wrote, not Mam but aliam" 

1 Aeneid, I. 396. 2 I. 116. 



INDEX 



Achilles, 76 
Aelian, 245 
Aeneas, 136 
Aeschylus, 18 
Aesopus, 7, 40 
Afranius, 57 
Ajax, 6 

Albinovanus, 23 
Alexander, Bp., 309 
Alexandrian School, 168 
" Anima cortese," 133 
Annalis, Sextus, 31 
Anti-Lucretius, 77 
Apollonius Rhodius, 38 
Arbuscula, 6 
Ariosto, 26 
Aristophanes, 121 
Aristotle, 126 
Arnold, Matthew, 79 
Atellane plays, 9, 218 
Attilius, 8 
Attis, ti2 
Attius, 38-41 
Ausonius, 263 

Bacon, 128 

Barbaria, 45 

Bassus, Caesius, 163 

Bentley, 193 

Beranger, 209 

Bibaculus, 14 

Bossuet, 61, 164 

Bowen, Sir Chas., 295 ff 

Brady, Nathaniel, 42 

Browning, Mrs. E. B., 100 

Brundisium, 173 

Bucco, 10 

Biicheler, 249 

Burns, 105, 107, 108 

Bu^, 105, 121 

Butler, 307 

Byron, 108, 123, 124, 268 

Caecilius, 56 

Caelius, M. Rufus, 98-100 
Caesar, 11, 13 
Caesius Bassus, 163' 
Calidus, L. Junius, 22 
Calvus, 14, 107 
Casaubon, 222 
Chateaubriand, 144 
Chaucer, 168 
Chesterfield, 164 
Chrysippus, 230 



Cicero, 5, 12, 14-19. 39. 75. 93, 95, 99, 

118, 169, 172 
Cinna, 14 

Claudia, wife of Statius, 283 
Claudian, 26, 293 
Clinamen, 78 
Coleridge, 103 
Collegium Poetarum, 20 
Comedy, 7 

Conington, 108, 142, 148, 316 
Cornutus, 229 
Cotta, 23 
Crispinus, 281 

Dante, 116, 127, 145, 305 
Darwin, 86 
Democritus, 61 
De Musset, 79, 119, 164 
Domitian, Martial on, 285 
Donne, 168 
Dorsennus, 10 
Drances, 134 
Dry den, 49 

Earinus, 289 

Elegiac poetry, 1 18-124 

Ellis, Prof., 114, 115 

Empedocles, 81 

Ennius, 30-35 

Enthusiasm of Lucretius, 68 

Epicharis, 266 

Epicharmus, 82 

Epicureanism, 59 

Epodes of Horace, 196, 204 

Euripides, 33, 41 

Evander, 155 

Fabulae palliatae, etc., 8 
Fronto, 163 
Fundanius, 23 

Gallus, 23, 92 

Gellius, 15, 146 

Gibbon, 164, 175, 203 

Gladstone, Rt. Hon. W. E., 66, 133 

Goethe, 184, 193 

Gower, 156 

Gray, 311 

Gruppe, 185 

Hartman, 193 ff 

Henry, Dr. Jas., 309, 314-319 

Hirtius, 14 

Hooker, 164 



322 



INDEX 



Indigitamenta, 63 

Jebb, Prof., in, 207,293 
Jerome, 75 

Johnson, Dr. Sam., 240, 308 
Juvencus, 292 

Kant, 65 

Keats, 71 

Laberius, 10 

Lafontaine, 164 

Lehrs, 185 

Lesbia, 91-100 

Leucippus, 61 

Livius Andronicus, 28, 167 

Livy, 3, 92 

Lucilius, 167 ff 

Ludiae undae, no 

Luscius, 3, 56 

Macaulay, 29, 106, 123, 146, 267 
Macco, 10 

Maecenas, 187, 211, 215 
Martin, Sir T., 93, 103, 



108- 



192 



291 



Merivale, 122, 255, 

Meyer, 55 

Mezentius, 155 

Milton, 39, 79, 115, 122, 133, 305 

Moliere, 49, "55 

Mommsen, 117 

Montaigne, 164 

Mookerjee, 318 

Moore, 108, no, 194, 267 

Morris, Lewis, 306 

Morris, Wm., 295 ff 

Munro, 62, 66, 106, 108 

Muretus, 9 

Myers, 146 

Naevius, 29 
Nasidienus, 176 
Nature in Lucretius, 78 
Nepos, 117 
Nequiquam, 74 
Nero, 286 
Nettleship, 136 
Newton, 84 
Niebuhr, 128 
Novius, 10 

Octavius, 2r 

Odes of Horace, 197 £E 

Ovid,' 123-125 

Pacuvius, 35-37 
Palmer, Prof., 49 
Pappus, 10 
Patin, 23, 77, 118 
Paid, 127 
Peerlkamp, 193 
Penelope, 179 
Petronius, 13, 63, 162 



Philippi, 187 

Photius, 15 

Plautus, 8, 46-53, no, 181 

Pliny, 13, 17, 281 

Plutarch, 15 

Poe, 1 

Pollio, Asinius, 281 

Polyaenus, 83 

Pomponius, 10 

Pope, 168, 307 

Porcius Licinius, 3 

Postgate, J. P., 91 

Prologues, 50 

Propertius, 1 19-122 

Prudentius, 292 

Publilius, Syrus, 10 

Quintilian, 30, 32, 39, 43, 169, 172, 216, 

267 

Rabirius, 22 

Ravensworth, 307 

Religio, 62-65 

Remmius Palaemon, 228 

Renan, 128 

Reynard the Fox, 127, 156 

Ribbeck, 317 

Rickards, 307 

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 71, 143, 227 

Royal Institution, 83 

Sabine Farm, 187 

Sacred Way, 172 

Sainte-Beuve, 128 

Sapphics, 106, 291 

Scaliger, 9, 128 

Senatus Consultum de Bacchanalibus, 

64 
Scipio, 6, 55 
Scott, 133 

Sellar, Prof., 53, 119, 123, 138, 166 
Seneca, 6, 15, 39, 76, 127, 145 
Severus, 22 
Shaftesbury, 208 

Shakespeare, 15, 34, 46, 53, 139, 305 
Shelley, 14, 101, 142 
Sidonius Apollinaris, 270 
Silius Italicus, 26, 269, 292 
Sophocles, 5, 18, 85 
Spinosa, 65 
Statius, 166 

Stevenson, Robert Louis, no 
Sulpicius, 76 
Swift, 80 
Swinburne, 312 

Tacitus, 15, 127, 252, 257 

Tarpa, 20, 56, 281 

Tasso, 26 

Tate, Nahum, 42 

Telamon, 5 

Tennyson, 40, 60, 67, 87, 114, 115, 124, 

305', 3" 
Terence, 8, 53-56 



INDEX 



323 



Thackeray, 80, 164, 209 
Theocritus, 204 
Theophrastus, 220 
Thomson, James, 70 
Thornhill, Canon, 295 fl 
Thrasea, 230 
Tibullus, 120 
Titinius, 8 
Trabea, 8 
Trachiniae, 5 
Tragedy, 7, 32 
Trimalchio, 275-280 
Tullia, 76 
Turpihus, 8 

Ulysses, 5 
Urbanitas, 26 
Utica, 20 



Valerius Flaccus, 26, 269, 292 
Valerius Maximus, 11 
Valgius, 22 
Varius, 23, 32 
Velleius Paterculus, 22, 37 
Verrall, 185 
Virginius Flavins, 228 
Voltaire, 65, 128, 144, 164 
Volusius (Tanasius), 97 

Webster, 33 
Whitman, Walt, 1, 72 
Wordsworth, 164 

Xenophanes, 81 

Zeus in Homer, 132 



•+- 



Critical Studies of Poetry. 

The Nature and Elements of Poetry. 

The first series of Lectures delivered, in 1891, on the Percy Turn- 
bull Memorial Lectureship of Poetry at Johns Hopkins Univer- 
sity. By Edmund Clarence Stedman. With Frontispiece 
after Diirer, Topical Analysis, and Analytical Index. Third 
Edition. Crown 8vo, gilt top, $1.50. 

Contents: Oracles Old and New ; What is Poetry? Creation and Self- Ex- 
pression ; Melancholia; Beauty; Truth; Imagination; The Faculty Divine, Pas- 
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"A wholesome and refreshing wind blown from the clear cold heights of phi- 
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Victorian Poets. 

By E. C. Stedman. With Topical Analysis in margin, and full 
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"Mr. Stedman deserves the thanks of English scholars. He is faithful, stu- 
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Poets of America. 

By E. C. Stedman. With full Notes in margin, and careful Ana- 
lytical Index. Thirteenth Edition. i2mo, $2.25 ; half calf, $3.50. 
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" No such thorough and conscientious study of the tendencies and qualities of 
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The Growth and Influence of Classical Greek Poetry. 

The second series of Lectures, in 1892, on the Percy Turnbull Me- 
morial Lectureship. By R. C. Jebb, Litt. D., LL. D., Regius 
Professor of Greek in the University of Cambridge, author of 
"Attic Orators," "Modern Greece," etc. Crown 8vo, gilt top, 

$1.50. 

Contents: The Distinctive Qualities of the Greek Race as expressed by Ho- 
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" Prof. Jebb so well combines all the powers requisite for the interpretation 
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" We know of no book upon the same subject and upon the same scale which 
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Sold by all Booksellers. Sent, postpaid, by 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO, Boston. 
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